Andrew Ferguson

The terms of the software and IP licensing can vary significantly.

The number of employees obtained in the transaction can vary.

And so we're trying to understand these things, first of all, because the last thing I want to do is sort of blindly charge ahead with a bunch of sort of predetermined assumptions and start trying to apply the law to something we don't understand.

But it is very important to me, because it's very important to Congress, that people not

try to come up with ways to attempt to get around pre-merger review, and that's what we're looking at.

And again, it's just not necessary.

I get why people wanted to do this in the previous administration, where the antitrust enforcers tended to use the process as a way to block deals rather than sort of being more honest about it and taking people to court.

But under the Trump administration,

We are either going to get out of your way very quickly or we are going to take you to court.

We're not letting the process be the punishment.

And so people don't need to try to come up with ways to get around HSR.

You will get a fair shake at the FTC.

Yeah, I mean, Congress passed and the president signed in spring of last year the Take It Down Act, which is seminal, groundbreaking legislation to protect people from artificially generated, non-consensual, intimate images.

The criminal component of that law that the Department of Justice enforces is already in effect.

The part that we enforce, where we have to compel platforms to take down these images and then bring enforcement actions that they fail will take effect in the spring, we are getting ready for that.

I have been meeting with sort of the elite child protection prosecutors and investigators at the Department of Homeland Security to make sure that we're synced up on that mission

This is relatively new to the FTC, and I want to make sure we hit the ground running when the authority takes effect.

Right now we are hiring specialists, prosecutors, lawyers, investigators, and IT experts to enable us, the second that this thing takes effect, to start bringing enforcement actions wherever these things are happening.

And I don't care what kind of company you are.

If you are a platform, whether you're a legacy social media company, a burgeoning AI company, I don't care.