Andrew Ferguson is the free-speech champion we need at the FTC’s helm

Since his unequivocal triumph last month, Donald Trump has been on a tear with his staffing choices, naming aggressive reformers and anti-establishment firebrands to top positions across his incoming administration.

On Tuesday, he announced one of his most important selections: the chairmanship of the Federal Trade Commission. Andrew Ferguson, the former Virginia solicitor-general who became a commissioner at the agency earlier this year, will take the helm.

For opponents of online censorship, this is exciting news.

Ferguson has already demonstrated a key understanding of the forces that propel online censorship in the private sector, zeroing in on collusive behavior in the advertising industry that has driven boycotts against free speech platforms like X.

At the same time, Ferguson is aware that the government’s actions can also make problems in the private sector even worse.

In September, he criticized the Democrat-led FTC’s uncritical attitude to “AI safety experts,” who are often little more than DEI-pushers in disguise.

“The truth is that these AI safety groups, as they are often called, have proven to be little more than rebranded versions of the DEI bureaucracies that have infected America’s businesses and colleges,” Ferguson wrote.

This cognizance of both private-sector and public-sector threats speaks to the future FTC chairman’s pragmatism, and his unwillingness to bind himself to the diktats of any particular ideological camp.

This bodes very well — because excessive attachment to any school of thought, particularly on the FTC’s mandate to oversee the private sector on behalf of consumers, can quickly derail efforts to tackle issues like censorship and political bias.

When I first began writing about big tech censorship in 2015, the most resistance I faced on the right came from the old school, free-markets-and-deregulation brigade.

Ferguson criticized the Democrat-led FTC in September. AP

From their perches in the libertarian think tanks of Washington, DC, this faction reflexively opposed interference in the private sector — even when it was colluding to censor Americans.

Many in this group opposed state-level legislation that would allow consumers to reverse unfair deplatforming in court.

Toward the end of Trump’s first term, a new faction was on the rise: the anti-monopolists.

Far more receptive to concerns about online censorship, these modern-day trust busters saw Big Tech’s concentration of power as a fundamental threat to the American consumer.

A bipartisan movement, the anti-monopolists were just as likely to praise Democratic FTC chair Lina Khan as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who, in his former role, was the first state attorney general to launch an antitrust investigation against Google.

At a time when every major tech platform was colluding to silence a former president, the new populist, anti-monopolist movement held a lot of promise.

But their reflexive enthusiasm to regulate Big Tech proved just as problematic as the libertarians’ reflexive opposition.

Voices on both the left and the right backed Australian- and Canadian-style legislation in the United States that would have forced tech platforms to provide a steady stream of ad revenue to old-school news companies.

When the public demanded checks on the power of Big Tech, I don’t think bailing out the establishment media was quite what they had in mind.

Despite its recent vintage, the anti-monopolist movement also seems a little out of step with the times, at least on the question of censorship.

In rapid succession, virtually all of Silicon Valley’s major names, from Elon Musk to Marc Andreessen, have turned decisively and vocally against online censorship — reacting  to government pressure with outright rebellion against it. The FTC has responded with aggressive investigations into Musk’s companies.

Set against this trend, the overarching anti-monopolist prescription — give the government in general and the FTC in particular more power to regulate big tech — seems prematurely outdated.

Don’t get me wrong: Both libertarians and populists have something to offer.

The former are quick to notice how government overreach can lead to censorship and political bias in the private sector — a major theme of our research at the Foundation for Freedom Online.

Meanwhile, the anti-monopolists have a keener eye for collusive behavior in the private sector (such as the advertising industry’s insidious pro-censorship coalition) that serve the same purpose.

For the FTC to be an effective ally in the fight against online censorship, it needs a pragmatic and independent-minded chairman who can draw the best solutions from both schools of thought, without being unduly constrained by either.

From everything I’ve seen, Andrew Ferguson will be that chairman.

Allum Bokhari is a director at the nonprofit Foundation for Freedom Online, which investigates the causes and consequences of online censorship.