Created by americas Cable Television comedies as Public Service and brought to today by your Television Provider. This week on the communicators of democratic member of the federal trade commission, rebecca slaughter. Our guest reporter is leah nylund who covers technology and antitrust for politico. Commissioner slaughter, what has this pandemic fed like for you when it comes to your work at the ftc . Guest thank you so much for thinking for having me. It is a pleasure to be here today. Well, as you can see from my special guest here what this pandemic has involved for me in part has given me a brandnew baby and juggling those response abilities which is not a common occurrence for commissioners pandemic or no pandemic. Ive been muddling through that and then in terms of the work of the agency it has been a really important and really fascinating time. We switch to all telework pretty quickly and i will say it relatively seamlessly in march, which i was very impressed by but even though the technological work got up and running very quickly at least for me personally i found it incredible he challenging to be juggling the responsibilities of the job and fulltime parenting. This baby here is my fourth so i had three kids who are home fulltime and needed fulltime attention and a job that needed fulltime attention. Even with an incredibly supportive partner that was enormously challenging. My first reaction to your question is really to think about the logistics and i know that that was true for me it was maybe double true for our staff across the agency just like it is for people working from home across the country, whether they have small children in our house or elderly relatives that they are caring for or sick family members or they are dealing with being [inaudible] and we cant discount the human toll that this pandemic has taken even as he tried to proceed with our extreme important work. Host commissioner slaughter, how has the agenda for the ftc changed since march . Thats a great question. I would say a couple of things. The first thing is we had and continue to have an incredibly full docket of important casework that we cannot and will not let slip. That includes ongoing merger and acquisition reviews, that includes ongoing, you know, general Consumer Protection cases and antitrust conduct investigations so those dont go away just because the panama appeared but with the pandemic came more additional work. This included a huge onslaught of coronavirus related scams and frauds. Everything from fraud related to ppp loans and people peddling fake cures and selling ppe and not delivering on that and those are all issues that the agency has taken up which are new to the pandemic and and antitrust arena i am particularly concerned about the potential for and the possibility that we are seen an uptick in opportunistic acquisitions that are competitively concerning. People basically taking advantage of the pandemic and that is a huge amount of work that is the result of the Economic Uncertainty that we are facing and it is one we really have to rise to meet. Host lets bring in leah of politico into this conversation to explore some of those issues you mentioned. Thank you, peter. Good to see you, commissioner slaughter. Guest thank you. I am sure you are aware President Trump signed an executor border and may suggesting that the ftc consider taking action against Online Platforms that restrict speech in ways consistent with their public representation. What are your thoughts on figurative order and do you think the ftc should take any actions . Guest it is very difficult for me to see what actions we could take consistent with our legal mandate and responsibilities under the order. We are not political speech police, nor should we be. I found the order kind of confounding from a legal basis and not really one that would give rise to any kind of action that i could envision myself supporting. A few of your colleagues have proposed possibly doing a study on how target advertising incentivize the policies the companies implement in this space. Do you thank you can support such a study . Yes, i think that is a good idea. In fact, ive also talked about how we need to do a 60 on targeted advertising and Data Collection because there is an enormously opaque black box into which our data goes that is turned around and used to target content toward us whether political or commercial in some of it might be manipulative and some of it might be fraudulent in better understanding that ecosystem is in honestly, normally important. That sounds like there might be three of you to support that. Guest i thank you may not be the first person to observe that there are three of us at least three of us who have thought this doing this investigative would be a good idea. I want to move on to a slightly pandemic related issue. As you know the beginning of the school year has been very different from a lot of school years because so many schools are moving to virtual learning, either parttime or fulltime. What advice do you have for parents who may have concerned about their kids privacy online in this new world of Online Learning . Guest the first thing i have is sympathy. Enormous sympathy because i am right there with them. I have two Elementary School age kids who are in the local Public School system and had to transition to an all Digital Learning environment with a sweep of new technologies that are not ones that we as parents can choose and even if we wanted to and even if we had the time to do the digging to figure out exactly what using data in what way it is the burden on parents that i think would be too high to even contemplate and i say that from the position of somebody who has a job, first of all has a job in this economy and one that is full enough that i conjure my work from home and be available to my children and has the most that i could want or wish for in terms of resources of devices and Internet Connection and all the things that are needed to make Digital Learning possible. One of the things i am really concerned about right now is the way that the Digital Divide is exacerbating, not just access issues but privacy issues today, particularly for children. We talked a lot and we should talk a lot about Digital Divide issues in terms of who has Broadband Access through kids that have to sit in parking lots of libraries and stores in order to get online for school. Im also worried about the ways in which the Digital Divide exacerbates privacy gaps where better off children from wealthier backgrounds can pay for privacy protective services or more access to things and lower income kids have to pay with their privacy and that is a problem that has preceded the pandemic but i think has been exacerbated and that is not just for whatever the Actual School programs are but for whatever else your kids are doing during the day which almost certainly within my house involves a lot more screen time that we had pre pandemic. Host commissioner slaughter, you referred to those you told the Commerce Committee that privacy and data issues are equity and civil right issues but what did you mean by that . Guest i mean that we cant divorce the questions of how data is used and abused from the questions of how that is done with differentially across different graphic groups. In other words, if it is not exclusively well, even if it is primarily economically correlated we know social, racially correlated how different groups have different access to data and higherpaying services and that structural inequity persists into questions of privacy. We have to be particularly careful and i think communities of color have to be particularly or we have to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which data is used problematically for communities of color. I think theres been some really good Academic Work about this, including issues like algorithmic and surveillance technologies and i dont pretend to have the answers but i am very concerned about the dynamics. Does the ftc have a role in solving those issues that you describe . Guest to the extent that our job across our mission area is to protect consumers and we absolutely can be protecting the most vulnerable consumers and though much of our statute and mandate doesnt explicitly contemplate racial inequality it does contemplate any quality issues that directly reflect racial inequality in america today. I think it is absolutely a part of the conversation that we are having and should be having and continue to have. Commissioner, last year they asked comments on how the workshop on whether to update the rules related to the childrens Online Privacy protection act which is one of the laws that the ftc and forces related to childrens privacy. I know that the potential or making is ongoing but hope you might give us an update on where that process stands right now . Guest sure. Thanks. Let me, one of the best ways for the childrens online protection law is that it does give us Rulemaking Authority and allows us to periodically review and update the requirement around the law to make sure we are keeping pace with the evolving technologies. In this area of technology is evolving so rapidly and we never appreciated that more than we have in the last year, i think. The last time it was updated was about eight or so years ago and that is, you know, eight lifetimes in terms of Children Technology. I am all for generally periodically reviewing rules and making sure they are working to figure out if there better ways for them to work and making sure we understand the technological ecosystem with which we are dealing. I would say in the first instance but the second instance is, i think, rulemaking is only one way to get that understanding and using our authority particularly with respect to the ad tech domain and how ad tech affects children is also something that we should be doing and probably would be valuable for us to have before any rulemaking is finalized. I dont want to be too prescriptive one way or the other about an ongoing rulemaking but im keeping an open mind about what it should look like but its externally important to me that it be fully informed and that we really understand what we are dealing with. The rules that we prescribed work well but there is no point in having them if they are not going to work well. Has a pandemic affected your thinking at all on this . As you mentioned, you have a lot of children doing Online Learning now. Yet, the pandemic has certainly affected the ecosystem that we are dealing with in terms of Children Technology and so i think it would be really shortsighted to not take a breath and take into account the new technologies that have emerged in the ways children are interacting with technology that they hadnt before and what invocations that has. Good. I want to talk about antitrust and its my favorite topic. Ftc is a series on the state of antitrust since beginning of the trump administration. The House Judiciary Committee has also had some hearings focused on the same topic and the chairman said they may propose some changes to antitrust law based on their findings. As someone deep in the weeds in this topic, what if i stay after members of congress as they consider whether to update the antitrust laws . Guest i love talking about antitrust due and a love of fellow antitrust nerd. Its exciting to meet when you say in the first instance this has become a topic of such focus Public Interest and congressional interest that i think certainly in the time i was working in congress i never saw even a fraction of this much attention to antitrust and it is such an important topic that affects basically the whole structure of our economy. Im excited to see the interest and glad to see the attention, particularly because i think a lot of enforcement efforts have been hamstrung or set back by bad Court Decisions that limit public and private enforcement in ways we cant fix unilaterally and Congress Needs to attack. I think that first of all, i think the folks in congress doing this work are doing it very thoughtfully and very carefully and dont leave me to tell them how to do it. But im confident that among the things they are looking at our court cases that have limited enforcement and how those might be changed. Also, some of the structural burdens and structural barriers that they face. I hope they will also take a close look at Resource Management to because i have been concerned since i got to the ftc and continue to be concerned that we are grossly under resourced compared to the mandate in front of us especially on the antitrust side. Well decide on many mergers and acquisitions get filed. That is work that comes to us and our budget doesnt really adjust or account for it. I am concerned that we see an increase in volumes of work without increase in resources and that means that we cant do the work as well. I say all of that but notwithstanding any of that i dont think the agency should be waiting for congress to do our own examination of what we can be doing differently and better. Just like i said i thought it was good to revisit the copper rules to make sure things are working i think we should apply that same selfcritical lens to our antitrust enforcement and try to figure out what we need to be doing differently to make our enforcement more effective where it is possible. One thing i talked about his vertical merger enforcement and i think we need to be more skeptical of vertical mergers and more aggressive on their and we can think about remedies carefully and i think that we need to be taking sort of stepping back and taking the big picture look at the structural effects of our encroachment priorities and how we at home and prove. One of the big features host tesco slaughter there have been some investigations a big attack when it comes to antitrust what are you views on that . Guest i cant comment on any particular investigation or confirm or deny any particular investigation but i can echo what the chairman said at his confirmation hearing which is when you have very Big Companies you may be more likely to find antitrust problems of air. Of course, we should be investigating them. And particularly in an area where there has been a loud continuous public from the not even politically but out of academia and out of practitioners and out of participants and markets to take a look at questions about anti competitive contact or potentially anticompetitive mergers and of course we should look at that stuff and follow the facts and the law and not be afraid to pursue violations where we find them. One of the age seen parts of the judiciary probe is the last hearing they had in which the ceos of the tech companies, apple, amazon, google and facebook all attended a hearing and were questioned by members of congress. I wondered if you tuned into that if you had any thoughts . Guest i did tune into it i thought it was really, really interesting. I think it is great to see congressional investigation running, you know, even as Law Enforcement investigations are happening because they can play different roles and serve different purposes, as you know and i have said lawenforcement investigations are nonpublic paired we can talk about what happening and they dont to be particularly transparent and that is for good reason and i understand that but its also important for the public to understand what is happening in these cases and for companies to be accountable to the public just as they are accountable to Law Enforcement. I think the hearing serves that goal really, really well. I was very impressed at their ability to pull that off in the middle of a pandemic with everybody scattered everywhere and with all the many, many things on congresses plate. About a week ago you had an interesting thread on twitter about how the ftc could use antitrust to help promote racial equity. You said and i quote, antitrust can and should be antiracist. Could you talk about your thoughts on that and how that would work . Guest sure, but first let me say the reason i thought it was a part and you talk about is, as i mentioned, i have this baby at the beginning of the summer right at the time when the nation wide protests were springing up and i wasnt doing a lot of public speaking or engaging in public debate because i think its important for parents to feel the space to step away from their work when they have new babies but i have been thinking a lot about this issue and moved by the National Conversation that we are having and part of that, to me, is doing a lot of introspective work about how i can be a part of the solution to some real profound structural problems, Structural Racism in this country. One thing that has always struck me as are about antitrust, even before this conversation is the world of antitrust, practitioners has, for a little while at least, seen itself as value neutral. That is been a principal that is been espoused loudly and symptoms quietly other times but this idea that antitrust should be apolitical and therefore must be value neutral is something i have never understood. I certainly understand being apolitical but this idea of value neutral has not made sense to me and let me explain a little bit. In every other area of Law Enforcement, we are perfectly comfortable with Law Enforcement not enforcers setting policy priorities consistent with Public Policy values but for example, a criminal prosecutor, who by the way is putting people in jail which is enormous, enormously highstakes endeavor is absolutely within bounds to say i will prioritize whitecollar criminal enforcement or Violent Crime or, in the case of this a Administration Immigration crime. We can agree or disagree with those priorities but you dont object to the enforcers setting those priorities consistent with Public Policy values. I dont understand why antitrust is the only area Law Enforcement we dont think like that or were not comfortable comfortable saying that we think like that. Because at the end of the day i dont think enforcement is ever value neutral. Just like i dont think we can never live in a functionally race blind society. Im so sorry. My lamp just fell down. This is what happens in my home studio. I was saying that i think that being a race line is one of those things that sounds like an aspirational goal but in reality it plays out only to advantage dominant race or white people and i think the being value neutral or reportedly value neutral in antitrust tends to reinforce structural inequities. Period in terms of specifically what i mean about antitrust been able to be antiracist but i mean is we should be conscious of the effects that are enforcement efforts have on structural inequities in our system and prioritize enforcement that makes our Economic System more equitable, rather than less. For example, we already prioritize healthcare enforcement prayed we have a whole division devoted to oscar enforcement. I think thats great really important. Not just because healthcare is something where ordinary people really feel the pinch of healthcare in material ways but also because we know that healthcare is an area where there is enormous disparity in outcomes along racial lines. Prioritizing, improving quality of healthcare to consumers and particularly paying attention to how concentration or how antitrust action can improve outcomes for consumers of color, patients of color is an important thing entirely consistent with our mandate and in fact, pretty close to how we are already functioning. Finding that same lens to other areas is important. Great, thank you. Youve been in the minority at the ftc since you joined in 2018 what a former president Vice President wins the election in november the democrats would be in charge of the agency. Should biden win and what would you like to see as democrat priorities for that . Guest one thing that i think has been nice is in the last several years as long as i have been doing this is there has been a lot of unity in the Democratic Caucus and among even president ial candidates about what we should be doing with the authority that we have and most of that includes sort of more and better, more targeted enforcement in some of the ways ive talked about in making our enforcement more effective which means making sure that the cases we bring we resolve in ways that help the most consumers and for me that often means having a really powerful deterrent effect so, for example, i was concerned about our facebook settlement before because i do think it would add ackley deter future bad behavior. When we bring cases to resolve them in ways we dont have to bring the same case again so i want to focus on those things and i think the ftc has a lot of Rulemaking Authority that has not been adequately explored including under the Consumer Protection side and under unfair messages of competition on our antitrust side. My commissioner has written a really good at law review article raising that issue and he and lena deserve credit for surfacing and authority that has been sort of broadly ignored and discounted at the ftc for a very long time. Those things are important and i also think restoring some balance to some of the bad caselaw that we have encountered and helping bring our resources up to speed with what our mission requires should be important to work with congress on. Host commissioner slaughter, at the beginning of this interviewee mentioned that the ftc are not political speech police. In your view is section 230 a key to the success of the internet and is there going to be any effect of a change to 230 on Net Neutrality . Guest first, on Net Neutrality that has been, and i think should be an fcc issue and at this point i think its pretty powerful ledge laid of issue, more than an ftc issue britt i think there are some that antitrust could achieve what i neutrality federal to regulation could achieve and it just doesnt and it just cant. So, i would put Net Neutrality in the ftc bucket as an extreme important priority and in terms of 230 i think the dialogue around 230 tends to get very messy and people dont even, theres not a widespread agreement about what section 230 is of an people say section 230 of the Committee Case and decency act but that is not what it is and its the good mitigations act and i think starting to understand what the law does is important and what it actually does is important for bribing internet businesses to an extent. Just like and address of concern there are big Court Decisions that misinterpret the intent of our statutes and i think thats been true around section 230 and in particular on concern about especially Companies Using 230 as a shield for otherwise applicable civil liability. I think that is an important area to consider reform but that is not the same as saying section 230 requires companies to viewpoint neutral and if they arent they should have liability. That doesnt have basis in the law i understand so i think went let me answer your question in a short way. I think the debate is modeled and important to be precise about what the law actually does and when it doesnt do and it does some important things today but also could be modified in some important ways so that it is not misused and abused to be that out of free card for otherwise illegal behavior. Host leah, time for one final question to the commissioner. Great, i was going to go back to Net Neutrality on one of the things that the ftc has talked about at the end of the trump menstruation was the repeal of Net Neutrality and do you think those rules should be reinstated under a Vice President biden given the return to broadband to the fccs purview as a title to service . Guest yes. Very easy answer. Host could you put explanation on that. Guest yes, happy to. The idea that we can with our existing Consumer Protection and antitrust laws provide the same kind of meaningful protections for Broadband Access that the ftc could under title ii is just incorrect in my view. Our Consumer Protection authority rests in this area largely on notice and consent which i think is a pretty broken model for enforcement and im happy to say more about that but im over noticing consent is been adequately protective today for consumers and is hard for me to see the competition angle to provide those same protections and to do the kinds of things that the ftc could do under Net Neutrality, including with respect to privacy. There is a host of other things that the ftc has the explicit authority to do that we dont. I think we saw the fcc under chairman wheeler start to move in that direction and i was pretty disheartened to see them pull back and i think restoring that work is an enormously valuable endeavor for congress to take. Host rebecca slaughter is one of two democrats on the federal trade commission out to five members. She was sworn in in 2018 and her term is for seven years and former chief counsel to senator Charles Schumer the democratic leader in the senate and is a Yale University trained lawyer. Leah is with politico and she covers technology and antitrust. Commissioner slaughter, we are thankful to you and hadi for joining us on the communicators. Guest thank you for having us. Cspans washington journal every day we are taking your calls live on the air on the news of the day and we discussed policy issues that impact eu. Coming up Tuesday Morning, we talk about the upcoming sipping court, nation battle with chief counsel for the Judicial Crisis Network and then with elizabeth president of the constitutional accountability center. A discussion about the history of president ial debate with the university of missouri mitchell mckinney. Watch cspans washington journal live at 7 00 p. M. 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