Fired FTC commissioners on fighting for their jobs back

Today, we have something special for you: A few days ago, I hosted a panel with FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya at the IAPP Global Privacy Summit in Washington, DC. We recorded the discussion, and we’re bringing it to you today.

That’s all pretty normal Decoder stuff, you might say — except these are anything but normal circumstances. Right off the bat, you’ll hear me even struggle to introduce them. Becca and Alvaro were FTC commissioners until very recently, when President Donald Trump fired them. The thing is, he doesn’t appear to have any legal authority to actually do that. As you’ll hear them discuss, by law the FTC needs to have commissioners from both political parties.

Additionally, there’s a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent that explicitly says the President can’t fire FTC commissioners in this way. So, given all that, they’re suing the administration to get their jobs back — and as you’ll hear, they are both committed to taking this case all the way to the Supreme Court.

Listen to Decoder, a show hosted by The Verge’s Nilay Patel about big ideas — and other problems. Subscribe here!

That puts them in a deeply weird, Schrödinger’s cat kind of position, for now: they both are and are not currently working as FTC commissioners, and that creates some strange tensions you’ll hear us get into.

On top of all that, of course, there’s the actual work of the FTC going on. The antitrust trial against Meta was going on basically down the street from where I sat talking with Rebecca and Alvaro, so I spent some time asking how that case was going — and why Mark Zuckerberg’s donations to the inauguration and frequent appearances in the Oval Office haven’t seemed to dissuade the government from trying to break up Meta. You’ll hear Becca in particular point out that being bad at bribes still means the government is open for bribery and corruption, and that creates all kinds of other problems for the economy.

There’s a lot going on in this conversation, from how the president fires you to the attempt in Silicon Valley to build AI into a digital god. We also somehow ended up taking printer recommendations from the audience. It’s a good one.

Okay: liminal FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Hi everybody. I am Nilay Patel. I’m the editor-in-chief of The Verge and host of the Decoder podcast. I have two excellent guests with me today. I’m going to say former Federal Trade Commission chairs.  

Alvaro Bedoya: That’s up to you. That’s your call. We would politely disagree.

Rebecca Slaughter: We would not say that.

Current liminal FTC commissioners Rebecca Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya. Welcome, thank you for being here.

RS: Thanks for having us.

I have a million questions for the both of you. Let’s start with the elephant in the room. Normally, in a conversation about privacy and consumer protection with FTC commissioners, it would be a fairly predictable set of topics, especially now with AI. It is not a predictable time in America. It is not a predictable set of circumstances. 

Let’s start with your status with President Donald Trump. He fired both of you. It appears to be illegal. Tell us how that happened. Did he call you?

RS: He did not call us. I’ll start by noting that Donald Trump originally appointed me in 2018 to the FTC. I was appointed as a minority commissioner, a Democrat. The agency is, by statute, composed of bipartisan members. The statute says: five members, no more than three from any one party. I was appointed in 2018 as a minority commissioner. I served as a minority commissioner, and then I was briefly the acting chair at the beginning of the Biden administration. Then, I was a majority commissioner, along with Commissioner Bedoya, who joined us in 2022, then became a minority commissioner again in January 2025.

On March 18, which was a Tuesday, I had finished a day at the office, meeting with a bunch of staff in the agency. Then, I was at my kid’s elementary school volunteering on a drama club project. We always joke that we like to keep the drama on the stage and out of our house, but no, the drama found us that day. I checked my email and I had an email from someone I’d never heard of in the Presidential Personnel Office with a message purportedly on behalf of Donald Trump announcing that I was terminated effective immediately. I stood up and I walked out of drama club to the courtyard, and I called Alvaro and I said, “Hey, have you checked your email?” And you can take the story over from there.

AB: I was very proudly not checking my email because I’d just arrived at my daughter’s gymnastics class, and she gets really annoyed when she does a cool trick and I’m looking at my phone like an idiot. So, I got a call and I picked it up and Becca said, “Have you seen your email?” And I said, “Actually, I haven’t seen my email.” And she said, “You should check your email because I just got an email purporting to fire me.” Sure enough, that same email was in my inbox right there.

Okay, I have a number of tech reporter questions. Did you receive a plain text email saying you had been terminated? I’m just imagining Donald Trump creating a PDF. That’s in my head.

RS: No, that did not happen. There was no PDF, there was no signed letter, there was no signature. It was a text email.

AB: There was no indication that there was any additional level of security associated with email.

I’m just curious about the mechanics of how these decisions are made. 

RS: It literally felt like somebody typed an email in their Outlook and hit send.

Very good, very on-brand. You guys are both in litigation against the Trump administration and  Chairman Andrew Ferguson. They are in what appears to be a violation of a 90-year-old Supreme Court case called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. I don’t think a district court is going to overturn that precedent. Are you prepared to go all the way to the Supreme Court on this one?

RS: Absolutely. This is not a complicated case. There’s no dispute about the facts and there’s no dispute about what the law says. The law says, very explicitly, that commissioners can only be removed for neglect, malfeasance, or inefficiency, so what we generally call cause. You’ve got to do something wrong. The email purporting to fire us did not allege any cause, and I feel like it’s important to say that there is no cause. Neither of us have engaged in neglect, malfeasance, or inefficiency. Alvaro is one of the hardest working people in not just Washington but the country, andI try to follow close behind him.

There is no cause. The statute says we can only be removed for cause. That statute was passed 111 years ago and 92 years ago was the last time a president tried to remove an FTC commissioner. FDR tried to fire Commissioner William Humphrey also for no cause. He sued, challenging his removal, and then he died before the case was settled, which is why this famous case is called “Humphrey’s Executor.” His estate pursued the lawsuit, and it went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The unanimous Supreme Court said, “Yes, that statute says commissioners can only be removed for cause. And yes, that statute is constitutional.” That precedent has been undisturbed, unchanged, unchallenged… well, it’s been challenged but not effectively for 90 years.

So yes, I would be shocked if a district court judge decided to unilaterally overturn 90 years of Supreme Court precedent. And yes, I think we are very prepared for this to be a case that is litigated up to the Supreme Court. Indeed, I think that’s what the administration is trying to do. They are unsubtly trying to challenge this 90-year-old precedent under the theory that the president should be able to fire whomever he wants. They argue that that is necessary for Democratic accountability. I find that argument a little ironic because I think what bipartisan commissions provide is accountability and transparency, even while allowing the president to execute his agenda by naming the chair and having the majority of the commission. There are lots of legal nuances, but it’s not a close case.

There is the unitary executive theory. In many ways, the Supreme Court has pursued that theory over the course of all of their individual careers. It does feel like maybe they want to overturn another precedent. They’re on a spree of overturning, although I’m not sure I learned anything in law school.

RS: Nothing we learned in law school remains relevant. It’s a fair point.

Right. It’s gone. What is a tort? Let’s find out. It’s a real situation. Do you think you have a good chance with this court?

AB: I think we do.

RS: There’s more nuance there.

AB: I think it is very important for people to realize that in a sense, this is about Commissioner Slaughter and I, and our continued service on the commission. In another arguably much more important sense, it is about a commission being able to serve without fear of favor, especially independent institutions like our own. And if the president can remove Commissioner Slaughter and I for no reason at any time, he can do the same to Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve. He can do the same for commissioners at the Securities and Exchange Commission. He has done the same at the National Credit Union Administration. He could do the same at the FDIC. These are bedrock institutions of our financial life.

So this is about privacy to a degree and about cybersecurity. But this is also about your retirement account, your checking account. Will those things that you hold quite dear be subject to the same stable regulatory and enforcement environment that is provided in a world where the leaders of these institutions are protected by for-cause removal productions?

RS: I think it goes even further than that because these institutions also include the FCC, the SEC, the CFTC, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, and a whole panoply of institutions that have been built up over the last 100 years by Congress explicitly to be bipartisan. If they effectively challenge removal protections, then what meaning do the appointment requirements have? 

Then, can these institutions even continue to exist because they would be so divorced from what Congress designed and built. I think understanding that the stability point that Commissioner Bedoya is talking about goes beyond if you’re going to have wild swings in policy at these agencies from administration to administration. It goes much deeper into whether these agencies can even exist. Can markets rely on the stability that they provide?”

Are you taking anything from the chaos around Trump threatening Powell and walking it back as the market reacted?

RS: What we are seeing is exactly what we’ve been saying, which is that he thinks he can fire whomever he wants. That he chooses not to doesn’t create stability. We are still in the same position of instability and uncertainty with these wild fluctuations that markets have been reacting to. I guess it’s good that he’s responding to market panic, but I would prefer not to panic the markets by following the laws that Congress passed and what our Constitutions says.

There’s another piece of this, which is that the FTC continues to operate. It’s in court right now against Meta, and it filed a case against Uber. Chair Ferguson told our reporter Lauren Feiner at a conference that he has to “obey lawful orders,” and that he will pull those cases if the president asks him. But he would be surprised if the president asked him to stop prosecuting Meta or anyone else. Do you think that’s a viable position? Is he saying what he has to say? Is he managing Donald Trump? Is that what he really believes?

AB: Let’s add a little meat to that bone, okay? Let’s just add some words to what you described. You have the chairman of the Federal Trade Commission say, “I think this trial is important. I think we are in the right in suing Meta. I think the law is on our side.” He said early on in his tenure, to his great credit, “I want to keep on going with this lawsuit.” You have a law enforcement official making that statement. You also have a law enforcement official saying at the same time, “But if the president gives me an order to drop that lawsuit, I shall do so.” Who is being served by that world? Is competition being served by that world? Are startups being served by that world? Who is helped by that scenario?

The other thing that’s very important to underscore is that just because he has not been fired does not mean he is not being influenced. Just because the people haven’t been fired doesn’t mean that they haven’t changed their behavior as a result of a very clear commandment: if you obey, you will stay, and if you don’t, you won’t. Every single person serving in government will tell you that that’s what’s happening right now. So for me, I look at that and I don’t see law enforcement or the mission of the Federal Trade Commission being served by that in the slightest.

It is notable that Mark Zuckerberg paid a bunch of money to build a library. He was on stage at the inauguration. He was in the Oval Office in the run-up to the Meta trial. But then he was on the stand giving testimony, and [Instagram co-founder] Kevin Systrom was on the stand. Why do you think that happened? Was is just not effective? Do you think Trump doesn’t like the bling?

AB: Look… wait Trump what?

He doesn’t like the bling.

RS: He likes the bling.

Trump is more of a classic necktie guy and [Zuckerberg has shown up with Caesar shirts.

AB: I shall not speculate on that point. Let’s just talk about the meeting. In any recent Republican or Democratic administration, a megadonor visiting not just the White House but the Oval Office to meet with the president after having donated $1 dollars to the inauguration to ask for a law enforcement action to be dropped against them would be front-page news for days. It would be considered wildly inappropriate, and it would be considered antithetical to the mission that the commission was charged with doing. I don’t really care what happens after that. The simple fact of that meeting being observed and noted by everyone serving in these positions of leadership–

RS: I’m going to put it a little bit more bluntly.

AB: Please.

RS: Bribery is bad even if it doesn’t work. Bribery is a problem even if it isn’t effective. We have a system of laws based on the idea that you prevail if the facts and the law are on your side and not because you tried to bribe anyone in the system. If we do not resist even efforts at bribery with every fiber of our being, we are doing an enormous disservice to the rule of law, administration of justice, and the operation of our democracy. I mean, genuinely and fundamentally, I think it’s that serious. So bribery is bad even if it doesn’t work.

Let me push on that just a little bit. Do all these guys just suck at bribery? Because they’re all in there. The Meta case is going, Google is losing its cases.

AB: Let’s talk about another gentleman who was on the stage at the inauguration, Mr. Bezos. Mr. Bezos gave  $1 million dollars to the inaugural fund. His company cut a deal that would benefit the first lady to the tune of $29 million, according to the New York Post. His company separately licensed the rights to The Apprentice, which as you might imagine didn’t cost a small amount. Subsequent to most of these things, the new [Occupational Safety and Health Administration nominee] in the United States was a former Amazon executive. 

This is a company that has, according to numerous studies, an injury rate two times higher vis-à-vis other large warehouses. This is a company that has so many injuries on the warehouse floor that the vending machines there dispense painkillers. This is a company that, according to a Senate investigation, was denying outside referrals to medical care of its own warehouse employees for up to 21 days allegedly as a matter of policy.

After you flow in a minimum of $30 million-plus dollars into those coffers, I think having the nation’s leading workplace safety law enforcer be a former executive of your company is astounding. So, I don’t know if these donations are not working, necessarily.

RS: I also think that if bribery doesn’t work, the reason is because the bribee says, “No thanks. I don’t do bribes.” If they say, “Cool, give me your dollars,” and then you don’t get what you want, your message is to give more dollars, right? That’s what I think we expect to see. To Commissioner Bedoya’s point, Amazon is also in not one but two active litigations with the FTC right now and is under order for a number of other things. In one of those cases, we saw an FTC attorney go into court and say, “Because of the DOGE cuts and resource constraints, we’re going to have to delay this trial.”

Now, Chair Ferguson had him walk that back very quickly, but nothing that attorney said in that courtroom was wrong, right? It was all true in terms of the resource constraints that the agency is facing and the effect that has on active cases and investigations. Is it direct influence? I don’t know. I am not in the minds of the influencers here, but I think it’s all stuff that should make us pay very close attention and be very concerned.

Let me ask about the Amazon case specifically. I think of the Amazon case, and I instinctively think of Lina Khan. She came to prominence writing “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” She became the chair of the FTC. She was a flash rod of controversy. Ferguson got his job by insisting that he would throw out all of her ideas. He hasn’t though, right? He’s kept the merger guidelines, and he’s stayed in litigation against these companies. 

The Amazon case is the hard one. That’s the one where we might actually litigate the consumer welfare standard and, win or lose, change that precedent. Do you think that one is at the most risk or is it the Meta case? Because I associate the Amazon litigation with Chair Khan so directly that it feels like it would be the first one to go.

RS: It’s hard for us to know what’s at the most risk. I see big, flashing, red danger signs all over the agency’s agenda right now. I think that case is important. Chair Khan wrote a piece, a very influential piece, about Amazon, but that is not what that case ended up being about. I actually really think everybody should read that case because what that case says — Commissioner Bedoya and I both supported that case, and I think we’re very proud to do so — was that you might associate Amazon with lower prices in your mind. But actually, the evidence shows that its conduct was raising prices not only on its own platform but across the internet, hurting not only consumers but also the sellers. 

So, it was exercising monopoly power in both directions. I think it reads much more like a traditional antitrust case than many people might have expected it to. We’ll see what happens in litigation if it gets to litigation and if it’s properly resourced. It’s very, very hard to know what’s actually happening behind the scenes if you’re not on the case team. So we’ll see. 

What everybody should want is the confidence that the law is being administered without fear or favor and not with thoughts about whose donors are going to be mad or when the phone might ring and ask you to totally change direction. That’s just bad. You can think the FTC is right or that the FTC is wrong, but you should want that case to be litigated on the merits. Period. Full stop.

AB: Let me also speak to something else you said Nilay. I say this to someone who’s lived in D.C. for I think 17 years or 16 years. I think Chair Kahn was controversial in Aspen, Davos, and Sun Valley. You go and talk to a rural grocer in Utah. You go and talk to the urban grocer in North Tulsa. You go talk to corn growers and cattlemen in Iowa about the work she led and that we worked with her on. It is the opposite of controversial. The response you get is, “What took you guys so long? Thank god. Where have you been all this time? I’m so glad you’re doing this.”

I get the same news sources. I’m not saying it’s coming from The Verge, but you get rained on by all this press that is focused on the stock market and Wall Street, saying all sorts of things. Half my family lives in Louisiana now. You go talk to them about the work we did. It’s a whole lot of nodding and a whole lot of support. So, I think there’s a certain picture of Chair Khan that’s been painted that’s true in very specific circles of this country. That’s the first thing.

Let’s talk about that Amazon case and what it’s about because I think some of the details get lost in this big title, “Amazon.” This is what we allege in that complaint. Number one, we alleged Amazon is a monopolist in that online retail market. We allege it has so much market power that if you’re a small retailer or a small seller, you need to be on Amazon. So once it has you, we allege it slowly started jacking up the price of selling your goods on Amazon, so much so that eventually, almost 50 cents of every dollar you made on that site had to go to Amazon.

So what happens? Find me a small seller who can afford to have a 50 percent haircut on every dollar they sell. So people start saying, “Oh wait, I can sell for lower off the site and make a bigger margin because I’m not taking a 50 percent haircut on every sale I make on that site.” So, we allege that when those small sellers moved off the site to sell for 10, 20, 30 percent less, that Amazon used a surveillance system to find those people who were [whispers] lowering their prices and penalize them by knocking them out of the preferred placement on the platform. You say, “It turned the consumer welfare standard on its head.” I think consumers are hurt by this, and that is emphatically part of the argument that’s being made here. I also think small sellers are hurt by this, but this is something that hurt people who wanted to pay less, and it was hurting the small retailers as well.

All right, I promise not to do another 20 minutes on hipster antitrust in this room. I can do it.

AB: No, no, no, we’re ready for it.

Let’s talk about Meta, which is indeed on the cutting edge of privacy in exciting ways. It’s at trial right now. That case was filed in 2020 under the first Trump administration. It was dismissed in 2021 under Biden and refiled. It’s back now. The heart of that case, to me, is an extraordinarily complicated market definition: personal networking services. There’s no one in that category except Snap and a thing called MeWe. How did we get there? It feels like what Meta is really keying on is being nonsensical.

RS: You’re doing hipster antitrust again. We’re back in it.

Look at me.

RS: Look, all antitrust cases are about market definition to a degree, and it’s a very tortured thing that makes people hate lawyers, honestly. The concept of antitrust law is very simple. The administration of it gets very complicated. So yes, most antitrust cases are about market definition, and market definition is always hard. Everybody has a different view about what the right way to define a market is that gets litigated.

What that case is really about is whether Meta bought competitors to eliminate the risk of competition. That’s the argument at the end of the day. Did it not want to compete on its merits but instead take out potential competition through acquisition in order to build and maintain a monopoly in a way that’s illegal? That’s what’s going to get litigated. But it’s not a lot more complicated than that, even if there’s going to be hours of debate around what an appropriate market definition is.

The reason I ask about that in this context is because Kevin Systrom is on the stand right now just dunking all over his acquirer. By the way, if all of us can have the confidence to sell our companies for a billion dollars, show up seven years later and say, “That sucked,” that’d be great for all of our self-esteem. It’s clear he didn’t like it. He’s saying very loudly they wanted to smother Instagram. That’s how he felt when he was running Instagram as part of Meta. 

But it still feels like Instagram got huge anyway and had Instagram been a separate company, I’m not sure it would’ve competed on a better privacy policy, or less personalized advertising. Kevin Systrom showing up on SuperLive being like, “I’m not listening to you,” does not feel like a likely outcome of Instagram being an independent company. I’m wondering, as you think about this landscape and all of the problems with consumer protection, what competition solves there and what do you need a regulatory regime to actually solve?

RS: That’s a really good question. I think the point that you’re making about what the counterfactual looks like is the hard question anti-trust agencies grapple with every time they’re faced with a merger. Every time you have to review a merger, the question is, “What happens if this company gets acquired and what happens if it doesn’t?” You have to make predictions about what will happen in the market, and that’s hard. That’s a hard thing to do. That’s okay, we can do hard things. 

I think that the counterfactual is hard to do here. That’s true everywhere, and it’s just impossible to know, honestly. So the question is, “Did [Meta] do the acquisition to eliminate this risk of competition?” more than what the counterfactual universe of [an independent] Instagram looks like. The question that you asked about why this matters for privacy and why it matters for consumer protection is a really, really important one.

Not for nothing, but Meta is also under order with the FTC for privacy violations, a renewed order that was issued in 2019 — from which I dissented — for which it paid $5 billion, and it’s currently in an administrative proceeding at the FTC over whether or not that order should be modified because there are further questions about privacy practices, including ones involving children. One of the reasons competition matters, and one of the reasons I think you see so many consumer protection cases against companies where we also have competition concerns, is because without meaningful competition and the ability for customers to vote with their feet and take their business to companies with better products that are less violative, you have an incentive to commit these violations, including to build market share. 

I’ll go back to an Amazon example. One of the orders that Amazon is under with the FTC right now involves Amazon Alexa devices’ illegal collection and retention of children’s voice recording info. Why did it do this collection of children’s voice data? It was in order to train its AI. So that’s, to me, a very clear example of a consumer protection violation that was orchestrated to build market share and market power. Going back to why you should care about us or our jobs — I mean, maybe you don’t care about our jobs — and why you should care about the institution existing is because it does have this cross-jurisdictional lens where it can look at competition and consumer protection. 

I will say, we haven’t done that very well historically. I think we have really treated these issues as siloed, but over the time I’ve been at the agency, we’ve been working really hard to integrate those functions better and understand the actual market dynamics that are leading to the kinds of problems we’re seeing both in competition and consumer protection.

Let me push that again. If this case is successful and the government succeeds in spinning off Instagram and WhatsApp, do you think there’ll be a meaningful benefit to how consumers experience privacy on these platforms?

RS: One would hope. One of the things that’s very frustrating about antitrust law is that ex-post enforcement is long, slow, and takes forever, and it’s very difficult to fix problems once they’ve started. One of the important purposes of bringing these cases is to prevent the next round of problems and to send clear signals to the market about the kinds of transactions that are illegal and should not happen to begin with. Yes, I would love to see healthy thriving competition with social media platforms, but I would also like to see that competition continue with new entrants, new innovation, and organic growth that isn’t just orchestrated through acquisition.

Do you think anything short of a breakup would be effective there? Like a long compliance regime?

RS: I’ve been talking a lot. You talk.

AB: No, I think you are most familiar with the case having voted it out. We’re answering a lot of questions about a case that right now is in trial, and so I don’t feel particularly eager to expound even more on it myself. You know what you’re talking about, so you should.

RS: I’ll talk generally about remedies. Everybody talks about what we call “structural remedies,” breakups as this radical approach. I find that very confusing. I actually think structural remedies are a much more small-c conservative approach because they keep the government out of the business and have the businesses operating independently. My impression over the time I’ve been at the FTC has been that complicated compliance regimes are very difficult to administer, less likely to be effective, and can, in fact, interfere with the free market operation of companies. That’s a weird thing for a Democrat to say, right? I generally like government. I think it can and should be a force for good. But I do think that administrability is a real concern in what we call “behavioral remedies.” Going back to the privacy focus, we’ve seen a lot of that concern in privacy remedies where we have complicated compliance regimes. Figuring out if they’re actually working and fixing the problem is not always that easy or clear.

I want to ask one more question about privacy as a general concept and then I want to end with some AI questions. There are a lot of reasons to feel nihilism in 2025 in America. One that I get from our audience at The Verge all the time is that privacy is just lost, that it’s over. Everyone is listening to us all the time. The data has been scraped, it’s gone. Apple should just give in and make a better AI system by scraping everyone’s data, and that it won’t do it is holding it back. You can’t put this genie back in the bottle. I hear this from our audience all the time. Then, I see things that I find very amusing in a dark way, like everybody on Instagram posting a screenshot saying, “I command Mark Zuckerberg to not take my data” like an incantation, and it’s great.

I look at that as the clearest market signal anyone can ever get. Everyone on my platform says, “I hate you,” but they can’t go anywhere and the terms of service do not change. They do not get renegotiated in the face of that. That is where the regulator should come in and say, “Everyone wants you to change your terms of service.” Do you think it’s just litigation that gets this done? Do you think that there is an ability through regulation to put this genie back in a bottle?

RS: I have said for a long time that Congress should pass a more specific privacy law. My own views about the contours of that law and what it should look like have evolved. When Congress started talking about it looked a little bit more like a notice and consent regime, and we all think that’s a terrible idea. We do not need more cookie banners. I think a minimization-focused regulatory approach would make a lot more sense. In fact, Congress got pretty close last year. Commissioner Bedoya and I both worked on the Hill. My experience of the legislative process is that it is absolutely torturous and everything is impossible until it’s a law. It’s never going to happen, and then it’s a law. So that fight needs to continue.

I think the best evidence that people actually really do care about privacy comes from the data out of Apple’s “ask not to track” system. I can’t remember what the numbers are, but the number of people who, when given the option to track or not to track, choose, “Please ask the app not to track” is overwhelming. That is a clear market signal that people actually would prefer, given the option, not to have their data shared. Where the trade-offs come up in that, like if they’re willing to get a free service in exchange for sharing data, are personal and complicated. But as a general approach, even though I think people sometimes feel like it’s a lost cause, they don’t want it to be. We have agency and we can work to change that process.

AB: I agree with everything Becca just said. I would add these thoughts. The first is that we haven’t lived in a world in recent memory where people have experienced what it’s like to have a meaningful online life with privacy. We’ve lived in a world where you’ve got a bucket with nine holes in it and a bucket with 10 holes, and both of those buckets suck. No one wants a leaky bucket, and so it’s hard to get excited about the bucket with nine holes in it as opposed to the one with 10 holes. I don’t think we’ve really lived in a world where we can say that people don’t care because I don’t think they’ve ever experienced it.

That said, I would point to two things that show me that people are changing their behaviors in response to what they perceive as the threat to their privacy. First of all, I have no idea how old you are, Nilay, but I know that Commissioner Slaughter and I are roughly the same age. You remember when we were in law school? The stuff people would put on Facebook was crazy. People would put everything up there. Now, you go up there, there’ll be one thing about politics, one post like, “Hey guys, I’m going to go for a long ride. What should I play for the kids in the back?” People are much more guarded on social media now than they were before. Secondly, look at the uptake in encrypted messaging apps like Signal and WhatsApp, especially in Washington, D.C.

Signal is very popular here from what I’m told.

AB: Quite prevalent, but it’s not just in Washington D.C.

RS: And not just for war plans.

AB: Exactly. You see a lot of people in business using Signal by default, and not just in areas where there might be some actual commercial espionage, so to speak. So, I do think you see very clear indications that people care about their privacy even though they’re living in that world of leaky buckets.

RS: I’m being a little flippant and making jokes, but I think we’re also in a moment where privacy has very real serious implications for people’s safety, security, access to healthcare, religious worship, political activity, all of these things. We’re seeing very real, very scary consequences happening to real humans who are not able to operate with privacy, and that’s something that is going to change behavior, too.

That is connected to this administration and its attitude towards data, to Elon Musk and DOGE. Do you think this administration is positioned to advocate for privacy while they are interlinking databases and using AI tools to surveil Americans?

RS: No.

AB: No.

I guess that’s the answer. I was hoping that you both would say that.

RS: I can’t tell if you’re baiting us, but it’s just a no.

I’m baiting but in a fun way. My friend Casey Newton has this phrase he uses called the “Splinternet.” He says the internet is going to fragment, not for technical reasons but for political and social reasons. What I see is that we’re about to build a very different kind of internet in the United States that has much fewer privacy protections while Europe begins to regulate tech platforms much more strongly. It issued fines just recently against Apple and Meta. That’s the sort of thing that breaks down data sharing across our different internets, across our different platforms.

How do you see that playing out? Do you think we can put that genie back in the bottle and make it possible for European governments to trust our companies? 

AB: Sorry, what genie again?

If our government starts allowing widespread data sharing within itself and stops advocating for privacy, stops pursuing a privacy law, or lets platforms share data more openly, which it appears to be doing.

AB: Let me speak very frankly here. What this administration is doing in terms of data sharing is a direct heir of everything that President Biden did, everything President Trump did in his first presidency, everything that President Obama did. In terms of law enforcement sharing information within the federal government, it has been an upwards trajectory arrow with every single administration. It is not like this administration with immigration enforcement, for example, is building a system that was previously non-existent from scratch. That is the opposite of what’s happened. These systems have been ready for many, many, years.

I candidly don’t think that the data sharing that’s being discussed today is radically different from the data sharing the federal government enacted prior to this administration. There’s a lot of other areas in which I disagree, but I think we need to be fair about this and the trajectory that intra-US data sharing has taken in recent years.

RS: I’ll push back on that a little bit because I think there is a substantial difference. At least in the previous administrations, there was support for independent oversight of some of that data use and sharing, such as the existence of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) and the checks on national security surveillance. That independent oversight, including at the FTC, has been part of what supported adequacy decisions in Europe and the ability of US companies to process the data of Europeans.

I do think we’re headed into a direction where that is going to be challenged, and it’s hard for me to see how those challenges are not effective. Who suffers when that happens? Who suffers if we have a different European internet? Humans, people who want to use the internet and communicate with each other suffer. That’s a problem. 

But also American businesses suffer. When I was working on the Hill, the biggest lobbying that we got over what was then the umbrella agreement was from US companies who wanted to be able to do business in Europe. Sure, the threats to cut off US companies from European market access will penalize Europeans, but it will really penalize US business. That is a profitable market for them, and that’s going to be a problem that I expect they will not be quiet about. I think we’re headed in that direction.

Fundamentally, there’s a big difference because privacy is a legal value in Europe in a way that it is not in the US. It’s not enshrined in the same way in our Constitution here. There’s always been this differential view. How it plays out in practice is going to be the subject of a lot of debate, discussion, parliamentary debate and discussion, litigation debate and discussion, and I don’t think it’s going to get resolved anytime soon.

One or two more questions about AI. AI companies make a lot of promises. They’re building digital god, they will replace your doctor–

AB: Sorry, did you say digital what?

Digital god.

AB: Digital god. Got it.

It’s just a phrase that I get to hear in my job. Totally normal.

AB: That’s awesome.

I run a magazine about cell phones. Super normal thing for me to hear all the time. An AI executive literally told me last night there would not be doctors and lawyers in the future because AI could just do it. This is the claim level that I hear on the regular from these companies. I don’t think they can do it. Maybe they can, maybe they can’t. It seems like they’re going to make a lot of people a lot of promises about the efficacy of their products. How would you address that in the trade context?

AB: Let me address it in the regular human context. That is idiocy, the idea that there will be no doctors in the future. How long have we had printers? Forty years? How well does your printer work? You’re going to let an AI doctor diagnose you for life or death matters, let alone a wart?

I think this idea is inane and should not be treated with any degree of respect. I have been shocked by some of the things that these AI execs get away with saying. Someone who runs a company that is valued at something like half a trillion dollars should not be able to say that sentience will be an emergent property in the near future. That is something that anyone who’s familiar with the technology does not think is a serious take unless there are other things going on.

Have you ever been to a chili cook-off and a guy arrives like, “I don’t know what’s going to happen here! Could get pretty crazy with my chili!” These claims are what lawyers would call puffery and need to be treated as such.

RS: It’s also nothing new, right? For a century, the work of the Federal Trade Commission has been to police misleading claims about what products can do. We do it with so-called medicinal products, dietary supplements, and technology products. This is not new.

One of the things that Commissioner Bedoya, Chair Khan, and I have been saying for years now is there is no AI exception to the law. It doesn’t create special rules for AI. We apply the same rules, which are that you can’t misrepresent what your product can do. You can’t lie about it and can’t commit deceptive or unfair acts or practices. That’s true with AI products, too.

Out of the body of work that the FTC has brought around AI in the last several years, some of it has been with an eye towards competition so that there is healthy competition in this, I think, incredibly important and valuable technological tool that is not the same as replacing doctors. But a lot of it has also been about misleading claims, business opportunity scams, people saying they’re get-rich-quick schemes, and it’s all the same sort of thing we’ve seen with every other technological iteration over the last 100 years.

I think it’s important to take a step back and see through what is new, interesting, different, innovative, or a valuable tool, and what is just the same stuff we’ve been seeing for decades.

I would say very few people thought their laser printer was alive, which is a meaningful difference that comes up over and over again.

AB: The point is how well does your printer work? Does your printer work awesome?

I write a printer recommendation every year. I’ll send you some.

AB: Please, please.

This is a real thing.

AB: Raise your hand if your printer works awesome.

This guy right here.

AB:  Yeah, thank you. One hand, two hands.

I’m not going to endorse products.

AB: Seriously raise your hand if your printer is awesome. Two hands. What’s that? What printer?

Yeah, see? He knows.

AB: Brother laser printer. Take the recommendation otherwise because the other 98% of the room does not think their printer is awesome.

There’s affiliate links on theverge.com. The promo code is printer. 

RS: I think your point is that generative AI is messing with people’s brains because it looks human and it’s not human. Are we confused about how to deal with this technology? That is very true. Understanding how to relate to technology and how to process what’s real and not real is a challenge for people. I remember when AirPods first came out, and you’d see people walking down the street talking to themselves, and everyone would be like, “What is happening? This is a very weird social scene.” They did not understand. Then, we became accustomed to it and learned how to interact with it. 

I remember when smartwatches came out, and all of a sudden you’d have people in meetings checking their watches constantly. I remember the first time it happened to me, and I was like, “Am I so boring? Are they just counting the seconds until they can get out of this meeting?” I realized that they were getting messages and just peeking down. It’s just a different evolution. I do think there’s some of that, and this is a particular push for people. I think we need to be extra sensitive and careful about what it means for children, where we think about if judgment is available to do some of that social processing. 

I’ll go back to a really important case that the FTC publicly announced. It was referring to the Department of Justice in January against Snap. We didn’t make the complaint public, but we made the referral public and the general series of allegations involving the way Snap’s AI chatbot interacted with children. Now, Chair Ferguson wrote a very long and public dissent when he was a commissioner that was basically about the First Amendment rights of chatbots. That was weird to me and concerning. That’s the kind of thing we do need to have real meaningful debate and discussion about.

NP: I’m being told we’re out of time. Thank you so much, commissioners. This was excellent. We’ll have to have you back in soon.

RS: Great, thanks.

AB: Thank you.

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