New FTC Chair Fighting DEI Cuts Public Comments on Surveillance Assessment

While Lina Khan spent much of her four years at the helm of the Federal Trade Commission breaking up monopolies and fighting price gouging, it seems that Donald Trump’s new FTC chairman, Andrew Ferguson, has zeroed in on a single supposed cause for all economic woes. : OF THE. Sitting commissioner Alvaro Bedoya doesn’t think that will do the trick, and a fiery opposition Ferguson’s war on diversity has highlighted a number of issues the FTC has been working on, but has now closed to public comment.

In Per Bedoyan’s testimony that Ferguson “doesn’t care about the challenges that regular people face,” he pointed to the FTC’s five requests for public input. This includes a question about how the Commission can protect employees from illegal business practices such as non-competes and no-bag provisions, fight predatory pricingand to help small businesses.

Perhaps most notably, it closed comments on a query about Ferguson application of control pricesincluding learning how companies collect and trade people’s personal data and use that data to set different prices for products.

The practice has become increasingly common, especially online, where companies gain access to large amounts of user data when a person shops for goods and services. It’s an experience most likely to be associated with plane tickets – believed to be the case with airlines for years change prices based on how often the consumer views the flight. But a recent FTC investigationpublished just before the end of the Biden administration, found the practice more widespread. Khan, a former FTC chairman, warned that companies set “targeted, tailored prices for goods and services” based on everything “from people’s location and demographics to their mouse movements on a web page.”

This seems like something the FTC should look into. Unfortunately, it seems that is no longer on the agenda. Commissioner Bedoya reported He said Ferguson’s focus on DEI was “a game to retweet on X – the kind of game that pisses off ordinary people who can’t afford to rent.” Certainly a way to reduce the rising cost of living that drives more and more Americans debt and poverty It doesn’t look like it will go through X. But who knows, maybe if Ferguson can collect enough tokens, he can share a revenue-sharing check with the American people.