Antitrust in an Election Year – 10 Minutes With Noah Phillips

Below, we have provided the full transcript of an interview with FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips from the first episode of our series, Antitrust In an Election Year: Challenges Ahead.

Leah NYLEN:

Thanks to CPI. I’m Leah Nylen, Politico’s antitrust reporter, and I have here with me today FTC Commissioner, Noah Phillips. Hey, Noah.

Noah PHILLIPS:

Hi, Leah. Great to be here with you.

NYLEN:

Great. As I’m sure you know, the House Judiciary committee, last week, put out its report on antitrust in the tech sector, and the staff recommended a number of changes to antitrust law and the FTC. What do you think about some of their recommendations?

PHILLIPS:

Thanks for the question, Leah. I think the big takeaway that I had… You mentioned at the beginning, they put out a report on antitrust in the tech sector, but a lot of the recommendations go much more broad than the tech sector. So, the report is a study, people have issues in how it was done, but it was a study on four companies and some of their business practices, and a lot of the prescriptions are broad fixes for the economy. I think, when I think about legislation, you want to figure out what is the problem you’re addressing? And you want to tailor a solution to that problem and think about unintended consequences and this sort of thing. And by design, this report focuses on four very big and very interesting companies without a doubt. But it then prescrib