Chairman: Trump broadsides on tech won’t sway FTC
Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joe Simons says he has heard President Donald Trump’s complaints about the size and political inclinations of large technology platforms, but isn’t going to let them affect his decisions.
“I was basically retired before I took this job,” Simons, who previously served two stints at the FTC, said Tuesday in an interview. “I’m just going to go back into retirement once I’m finished here, so it doesn’t really matter to me.”
The career antitrust lawyer said he doesn’t feel political pressure to heed Trump’s accusations against Amazon and Google as he steers an agency that could bring those companies and others, including Facebook, to heel on antitrust and privacy issues.
Trump has attacked tech companies and their chief executive officers in barrages of tweets as well as public remarks.
He has made unsupported claims that social media companies silence conservative views, while assailing Amazon for edging out brick-andmortar retailers and criticizing its founder, Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post.
“I’d have to be a monk not to hear them,” Simons said.
He said his staff ignores Trump’s broadsides over tech companies’ dominance and treatment of Republicans because their job is to look for evidence of legal violations.
“They don’t worry about what the president says,” Simons said. “They don’t worry about what the people on the Hill say.”
The allegations by Trump and his allies that the companies systematically muzzle conservative voices couldn’t form the basis of an FTC probe because the issue falls outside the purview of the antitrust and consumer protection laws the agency enforces, Simons said.
“We don’t have the authority or the expertise to deal with political speech,” he said. “Not on the antitrust side, not on the consumer protection side.”
The FTC, which shares antitrust jurisdiction with the Justice Department, is an independent agency. It’s run by five commissioners from both political parties who are named by the president and confirmed by the Senate.
The president could remove any commissioner — including the chairman — for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance,” according to the agency’s statute. That’s never happened. The one president who tried — Franklin D. Roosevelt — was rebuffed by the Supreme Court.