Mark Meador's Nomination to the Federal Trade Commission Is Bad News for Consumers

Meador’s nomination is a win for antitrust activism and a blow to economic freedom.

President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday his intention to nominate Mark Meador as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). If confirmed, Meador would take over the commissioner slot currently held by FTC Chair Lina Khan, whose term expired on September 26.

Meador is an accomplished antitrust litigator, but his antagonism toward Big Tech, and bigness per se, will compromise Trump's stated goals of maintaining America's economic and technological dominance.

He has long opposed big business, from Google to Ticketmaster, and regards the free market as merely a means to the end of human flourishing, not as an end in and of itself. Meador's stance on economic freedom reflects his explicitly anti-libertarian conception of freedom as "requir[ing] order and restraints upon our passions." Achieving Meador's vision of freedom apparently also requires restraints upon trade.

Meador helped write the Advertising Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act to break up Google's ad tech stack while serving as deputy chief counsel for antitrust and competition policy to Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah). Meador's animus toward Big Tech was confirmed by The Heritage Foundation heralding his visiting fellowship at its Tech Policy Center as "a significant milestone in our mission to hold Big Tech accountable for its anticompetitive practices."

If confirmed, Meador would be the de facto anti-Big Tech commissioner at the FTC. Andrew Ferguson, a current FTC Commissioner and Trump's nominee for agency chairman, has also vocalized opposition to Big Tech. Ferguson has pledged to "end Big Tech's vendetta against competition and free speech" while also promising to "make sure that America is the world's technological leader," per The New York Times. Ferguson, like Meador, fails to realize that prosecuting Big Tech for acquisitions disincentivizes innovation by removing profitable exit opportunities for startups.

Meador's antitrust stance starkly departs from Ferguson, and fellow Republican Commissioner Melissa Holyoak, in his support of the Robinson-Patman Act (RPA) of 1936, which makes it illegal "to discriminate in price between different purchasers of commodities of like grade and quality." Meador has accused the FTC and Department of Justice (DOJ) of neglecting their duty to execute the RPA "through a deliberate policy of non-enforcement" and encourages antitrust enforcers to bring RPA cases where "consumers are harmed by price discrimination."

On Thursday, the FTC did just this by filing a complaint against Southern Glazer's Wine and Spirits. Democratic Commissioner Alvaro Bedoya's statement, joined by Chair Lina Khan and Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, alleges the beverage distributor violated the RPA by charging smaller liquor retailers higher per-unit prices for the same beverages. However, as Holyoak's and Ferguson's dissents emphasize, Section 2(a) of the RPA exempts those "differentials which make only due allowance for differences in the cost of manufacture, sale, or delivery."

The benefit of such pricing strategies, which exploit economies of scale to offer retailers and consumers bulk goods at lower per-unit prices, is evidenced by the popularity of wholesale clubs like Costco and BJ's. Nonetheless, given Meador's endorsement of the RPA, it's likely that he will side with Bedoya and Slaughter to bring forth more complaints in the next administration.

If confirmed, this would not be Meador's first stint at the FTC. After graduating from the University of Houston Law Center in 2011, he served as an attorney with the FTC's Bureau of Competition for five years. He was also an antitrust enforcer with the DOJ for two years before working for Sen. Mike Lee (R–Utah) from 2020 to 2023.

Meador's antipathy toward Big Tech, his endorsement of zombie antitrust laws, and his rejection of freedom as an end in itself bodes poorly for economic dynamism and consumer choice.

Comments

[Nobartium]

acquisitions disincentivizes innovation by removing profitable exit opportunities for startups.

Because nobody at the scale of big tech spends actual money on R&D, apparently.

[Don't look at me!]

Nobody could be worse than Khan.

/cpt. Kirk

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

Sleazy augment. Pushing some bullshit he calls ‘rich corinthian leather’

[chemjeff radical individualist]

Meador's stance on economic freedom reflects his explicitly anti-libertarian conception of freedom as "requir[ing] order and restraints upon our passions."

Yup, that's one big difference between libertarianism and conservatism.

Libertarianism views liberty as a birthright of all human beings, without reservation or qualifications.

Conservatism views liberty in terms of a moral hierarchy. Only those deemed morally worthy should be granted liberty. And part of that moral worth is determined by one's ability to 'restrain our passions'. The OnlyFans slut who sleeps with 100 men doesn't deserve liberty because she's a slut, so government must step in and correct the situation, even though there's been no violation of the NAP.

[Don't look at me!]

..so government must step in and correct the situation, even though there's been no violation of the NAP.

They did?

[sarcasmic]

Are her papers in order? That’s what matters.

[Fire up the Woodchippers! (5-30 Banana Republic Day)]

For visiting foreigners, yes.

[VULGAR MADMAN]

I love it when a confessd pedo passes judgment.

[Was it something I said?]

What are you talking about?

[TJJ2000]

Going after Big Tech is a RINO move.
The Left literally champions this stuff.

[Roberta]

Could've been worse. Could've been Vaughn Meader.

[Roberta]

...

regards the free market as merely a means to the end of human flourishing, not as an end in and of itself.

So do I, and I'm as libertarian as they come.

[Rev Arthur L kuckland (5-30-24 banana republic day)]

I don't know if his nomination is bad. Seeing as a jackass from reason said he's bad automatically makes me think he is good.

[TJJ2000]

Trumps administration "might", "could", "maybe" do blah, blah, blah.
Yet his first term *DID* De-Regulation and Tax-Cuts.

Pretty sure this is what they call Fear-Mongering.

[Uncle Jay]

"Mark Meador's Nomination to the Federal Trade Commission Is Bad News for Consumers."

No, the FTC is, and has been, bad new for consumers.
Get it right, DiCastro.

[johnnyz]

Is smoking weed cool w/ the Heritage Foundation? I didn't think so, fyk those jack booted thugs.

[Roberta]

How does that apply?

[Daddyhill]

I do like his view that a free market must not be an end in itself, but rather should be a source of all that is good for a given community (nation, alliance, trading partnership, etc.).

For me this implies that if a free market is not acting for the benefit of the entire community, it should be modified so that it does. The problem with the way Big Tech operates in our so-called free market is that it concentrates wealth and political influence in ever smaller numbers of actors: CEO's, CFO's, boards, investors, et al. The average incomes of higher-level management (CEO's, other executive officers) are now about 200-fold greater than those of production workers, whereas the difference in the booming '50's and early '60's was about 10-fold. The numbers of millionaires and billionaires increase every year, whereas real wages of lower- and middle-income workers haven't grown significantly since 2008.

In the '50's and '60's the US economy (if there is such a thing) was still based primarily on agriculture and manufacturing. Since then our economy has been financial-ized to an extent that made 2008 almost inevitable. The richest American corporations have stayed rich by focusing on the shareholder class, with stock buy-backs, splits, mergers, and acquisitions. Much of what we are supposed to marvel at in Big Tech, like Killer App startups, is a rigged game now. Audacious disruptive startups develop profitable exit strategies from the very start, which are intended to ensure that the original inventors will walk away with as much money as they can, even if the company fails and most employees get next to nothing. We perceive that many inventors' strategies turn on an expectation of a near-certain acquisition by somebody else, and this has happened often. We cannot be expected to believe that the consequences will benefit everyone, from top to bottom, when we know that the buyer all too often will fire half the current workforce, move the operation somewhere far away, and sell off intrinsically valuable assets as unneeded or superfluous. I believe that it's fairly easy to cancel someone's existing health care and pension plans.

Also, civilization could not exist without effective suppression of bad human behaviors for the good of the collective. We must be able to limit the "freedom" of the individual to live by the natural instincts for greed and aggression that had survival value for hunter-gatherers but have limited value for us. We feel the tension that is always there between our intense needs for community connections and our sometimes equally intense urge to reject the civilizing idea and behave as sociopaths and narcissists.

[TJJ2000]

"are now about 200-fold greater than those of production workers"
Which has been seen in every progressively 'socialist' community/market.

It's baffling how people believe Nazi indoctrination when *all* (yes; literally all of it) evidence points the other-way. As-if US healthcare, education, housing, etc, etc, etc hasn't been yet another perfect example of that. 'Guns' don't make sh*t no matter how sociopathic and narcissistic the 'civilizing' idea of socialism its indoctrination pretends to be. Their only humane purpose is to ensure Individual Liberty and Justice for all.