Common occurrence for commissioners, pandemic or no pandemic. I have been muddling through that, and in terms of the work of the agency its been a really important and really fascinating time. We switched to all telework pretty quickly and i will say 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 incredibly challenging to be juggling the responsibilities of the job and fulltime parenting. This baby here is my fourth so i have three kids home fulltime and needed fulltime attention, and a job that need fulltime attention. Even with an incredibly supportive partner that was in normalcy challenging. My first reaction to your question is really to think about the logistics, and i know if that was true for me, it was maybe doubly 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 their house for elderly relatives they caring for her sick family members or their dealing with being lonely and isolated. We cant discount the human toll that this pandemic has taken even as as a tie to proceed wit extremely important work. Host commissioner slaughter, how has the agenda for the ftc changed since march . Guest thats a great question. I would say a couple 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 general Consumer Protection cases and antitrust conduct investigations. Those dont go away just because the pandemic appeared, but with the pandemic came or additional work, including a huge onslaught of coronavirus related scams and frauds, everything from fraud related to ppp loans and people peddling fake cures, selling, reported to sell ppe and not delivering on that. Those are all issues the agency has taken up which are new to the pandemic. And in the antitrust arena i am particularly concerned about the potential for and the possibility we are seeing an uptick in opportunistic acquisitions that are competitively concerning. People basically take advantage of the pandemic. Thats a huge amount of work that is a result of the Economic Uncertainty we are facing, and its one we really have to rise to meet. Host well, lets bring leah nylen of politico into this conversation to export some of the issues you mention. Great, thank you, peter. Great to see you, commissioner slaughter. Im sure youre aware, presidt trump sign an executive order in may suggesting the ftc consider taking action against Online Platforms that restrict speech in ways with the public representations. What are your thoughts on the executive order and you think the ftc should taking action in the space . Guest it is very difficult for me to see what actions we could take consistent with her legal mandate and responsibilities under the order. We are not political speech pulleys, 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 action i could envision myself supporting. Your fellow colleagues, a republican and democrat proposed possibly during a study on how target advertising incentivize the policies companies implement in the space. Could you support such a study . Guest yes. That it think is a good idea. I have also talked about how we need to do target advertising data collection. I think theres an enormously opaque black box into which our data goes that is turned around and used to target content towards us, whether it is political or commercial. Some of that might be manipulative, some of that might be fraudulent, and better understand that ecosystem is enormously important. That sounds like there might be three of you who support that trick you i think you may not be the first person to observe our three of us who said we think this would be a a great idea. Great. 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 concerns about their kids privacy online in this new world of Online Learning . Guest the first thing i have is sympathy, enormous sympathy because im right there with them. I have to make Elementary School aged kids for in our local Public School system and had to transition to an allDigital Learning environment with a suite of new technologies that are not ones that we as parents can choose. Even if we wanted to, and even if we had the time to do the digging to figure out exactly what is using whos dated in what way, it is a burden on parent i think would be too high to even contemplate. I take it from position of somebody who has a job comfortable has a job in this economy, and one that is i can be home and have the most i could want, wish for in terms of resources of devices and Internet Connection at all of the things that are needed to make Digital Learning possible. One of the things im really concerned about now is the way the Digital Divide is exacerbating not just access issues but privacy issues today, particularly for children. We talk a lot and we should talk a lot about Digital Divide issues in terms of who a Broadband Access and kids are to sit in parking lots of libraries and stores in order to get online for school. But 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 low income kids have to pay with their privacy. Thats a problem that has preceded the pandemic but has really been exacerbated. Thats not just for whatever the Actual School programs are, its for whatever else you kids are doing during the day which almost certainly includes involves a lot more screen time than we had prepandemic. Host commissioner slaughter, you referred come you told the Commerce Committee that the privacy and data issues are equity and civil rights issues. 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 differentially across different demographic groups. So in other words, if it is not exclusively, well, even if it is primarily economically correlated, we know its also racially correlated how different groups have different access to data and higherpaying services, and that kind of structural inequity persists into questions of privacy. We have to be particularly careful, anything communities of color have to be particularly sensitive to the ways in which data is used, problematically for communities of color. I think theres been some good Academic Work about this including on issues like algorithmic bias and surveillance technology. I dont pretend to have the answers but im very concerned about the dynamic. Host does the ftc have a role in solving the issues that you described . Guest to the extent that our job across our mission area is to protect consumers, and we absolutely should be protecting the most vulnerable consumers. Much of our statute and mandate doesnt explicitly contemplate racial inequality, it does contemplate racial inequality reflects racial inequality in america today. I think its absolutely part of the conversation that we are having and should be having an continue to have. Commissioner, last year comments on the workshop on whether to update the rules would to the childrens Online Privacy protection act which was one of the laws ftc enforcer lay to childrens privacy. I know potential rulemaking is ongoing but hope you might be able to give us an update on where the process stands right now . Guest sure, thanks. So let me say this to begin with. One of the best things about coppa, the childrens online protection privacy law is that does give us Rulemaking Authority that allows us to periodically review and update the requirements around the law to make sure we keeping pace with evolving technologies. In this Area Technology is evolving so rapidly and weve never appreciate that more than we have in the last year i think. The last time trend imus update it was about eight or so years ago coppa was updated, eight lifetime the terms of the childrens technology. I am all for generally periodically reviewing rules, making sure theyre working, figuring out if there better ways for them to work and making sure we understand the technological ecosystem with which we are dealing. That i would say is the first instance. The second instance note is rulemaking is only one way for us to get that understanding and using our authority, particularly with respect to the ad tech domain and out ad tech affects children is also something 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 in one way or the other about an ongoing rulemaking. Im keeping an open mind about what it should look like but it is extremely important to me that it be fully informed and we really understand what we are dealing with so that the laws, the rules that we prescribe work well because theres no point in having them if theyre not going to work well. Has the pandemic affected your thinking at all on this . As you mentioned you have a lot of children doing Online Learning now. Guest the pandemic has certainly effective ecosystem we are dealing with in terms of childrens technology. It would be really shortsighted to not take a breath and take into account the new technologies that have emerged, the ways children interacting with technology that they had before, and what implications that has. Good. I want to talk about antitrust, my favorite topic. The ftc had a series of hearings on the status antitrust towards the 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 change the antitrust law based on the findings. As someone pretty deep in the weeds in this topic what advice do you have for members of congress as they consider whether to tackle the antitrust laws drifted i love talking to at antitrust and 11 a fellow antitrust nerd here its exciting to me when we say in the first instance that this is become a topic of such focused Public Interest and congressional interest. 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 a sickly the whole structure of our economy. Im really excited to see the interest and glad to see the attention, particularly because i think a lot of enforcement efforts have been hamstrung or setback by bad Court Decisions that limit public and private enforcement in ways that we cant fix unilaterally and the congress will he needs to attack. I think, first of all, i think folks in congress doing this work are doing it very thoughtfully and very carefully and dont need me to tell them how to do it, but im confident that among the things youre looking at our court cases that have limited enforcement and how this might be changed, and also somebody structural burdens and structural barriers that enforcers face. I hope it will also take a close look at a Resource Management because i have been concerned since i got to the ftc and continue to be concerned that we are grossly underresourced compared to the mandate in front of us, especially on the antitrust side. We dont decide how many mergers and acquisitions get files. Thats work that comes to us, and our budget doesnt really adjust or account for it. And so i am concerned we have seen increasing funds of work without commensurate increase in resources, and that means we can do the work as well. I say all that not listed in it 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 if i was good to revisit the coppa will to make things are working, i think we should apply that same selfcritical and to antitrust enforcement and try to figure out what we need to be doing differently to make our enforcement more effective where its possible. One thing a i talked about is vertical merger enforcement. We need to be a little more skeptical of vertical mergers, more aggressive on their enforcement. We can think about remedies carefully and i think we need to be taking sort of stepping back and taking a big picture look at the structural facts of our enforcement priorities and how we could hone and improve them. Host commissioner slaughter, there had been some investigations of big tech when it comes to antitrust. What are your views on that . Guest im not going to comment on any particular investigation or confirm or deny any particular investigation, what i will echo what the chairman said at his confirmation hearing, which is when you vary the companies you may be more likely to find antitrust problems there. Of course we should be investigating them, and particularly in an area where there is been a loud continuous public drumbeat, not even politically but out of academia and out of practitioners and other participants in market to take a look at questions about anticompetitive conduct or potentially anticompetitive mergers. Of course we should be looking at that stuff and follow the facts and the law, and not be afraid to pursue violations wherever we find them. One of the really interesting parts of the house judiciary probe was the last thing they had in which the ceos of the four big tech companies, apple, amazon, google and facebook all attended the hearing and were questioned by members of congress. I wondered if you tuned into that and if you have any thought . Guest i did tune into. I thought it was really, really interesting. I think its great to see congressional investigations rhyming even as Law Enforcement investigations are happening because they can play different roles and serve different purposes. As unit and as ive just said a Law Enforcement investigations are nonpublic. We can talk about whats happening. They dont tend to be transparent, and that is a good reason and i understand that. But i think its also important for the public to understand whats happening in some of these cases and for companies to be accountable to the public just as there are accountable to Law Enforcement. I think the hearings serve that goal really, really well, and i was very impressed at their ability to pull that off in the middle of the pandemic with everybody scattered everywhere and with all of the many, many things on congresses plate. About a a week ago you had n interesting post on twitter about how the ftc could use antitrust to help promote racial equity. You said quote antitrust can and should be antiracist. Can you talk about your thoughts on that and how that would work, in your view . Guest sure. First let me say the reason i thought this was important to talk about was, as i mentioned, i had this baby at the beginning of the summer right at the time when the nation wide protests were really springing up. I wasnt doing a lot of public speaking or engaging in public debate because i actually think its important for parents to feel the space to step away from the work we may have new babies. But i have been thinking a lot about those issues and really moved by the National Conversation were having, and part of that to me is doing a lot of introspective work about how i i can be part of the solution to some real, profound, structural Structural Racism in this country. One thing that is always struck me as bizarre about antitrust even before this conversation is the world of antitrust practitioners has for a little while at least releasing itself as value neutral, and thats been a principal thats been espoused, sort of loudly, sometimes quietly other times. But this i get that had the apolitical and, therefore, must be value neutral something i have never understood. I understand being a Political Society of value neutral hasnt made a lot of sense to me and let me explain that a little bit. In every other area of Law Enforcement we are perfectly comfortable with Law Enforcement enforcer setting policy priorities consistent publicpolicy values. So, for example, a criminal prosecutor who by the way is putting people in jail which is an enormous enormously highstakes endeavor, is absolutely within bounds to say im going to prioritize white collar criminal enforcement or Violent Crime or in the case of this Administration Immigration crime. We can agree or disagree but we dont object to the enforcers setting those priorities consist with publicpolicy values. I dont understand why antitrust is the only area of Law Enforcement will be dont think like that or we are not comfortable saying that we think like that, 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 ever live in a functionally race blind society. That is an aspirational goals im so sorry, my lamp just fell down. This is what happens in my home studio. I was saying that i think that being race blind above those things it that sounds like an aspirational goal, but in reality it plays out really only two advantage dominant race or white people. I think being value neutral or purportedly value neutral on antitrust tends to reinforce inequities. So thats big picture thinking. In terms of specifically what i mean about antitrust being able to be antiracist, what