Deborah Platt Majoras Interviewed
The San Francisco Chronicle has a lengthy interview with FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras in Sunday’s paper. A few highlights:
Q: There seems to be quite a number of mergers these days. Are you more friendly to mergers than previous administrations? A: I read that all the time. It’s simply not borne out at the FTC. You look at the number of mergers we’ve challenged or if you look at it as a percentage of the merger filings, it’s pretty even since about the first Bush administration. I can’t think there was a merger that people have pointed to and said, “Why didn’t you guys take a closer look or why didn’t you challenge it?” To me it’s not some political thing that shifts a whole heck of a lot. I think I’ve brought three cases in the past week. … Q: High gasoline prices are one of the foremost consumer issues in California. What role do you play?A: In gasoline, because it’s such an important issue to consumers, we monitor prices in 360 retail markets and 20 wholesale markets every week. We look for anomalies in the pricing. When we think we have identified some, we do a check and try to figure out what was going on: Was there a refinery fire? An outage? The difficulty here is that there is a lot of misperception about this market. Everywhere you go, you hear, “Oh the market has become so much more concentrated.” Interestingly enough, it hasn’t in many parts of it, particularly at the exploration and actual oil end of it. Refining has tightened some. On the other hand, small refiners have bought up other refiners so they have been able to compete with the large integrated refiners. The difficulty is that we have looked for anti-competitive behavior in this industry time and again, and we keep looking for it. Congress would like the problem to be solved by me suing a bunch of oil companies — or OPEC. Like that’s going to solve our energy problem. It’s just not. We are going to scrutinize, really, really carefully, any merger relating to gasoline. But we have energy policy issues in this country that are not being solved today. And they are not going to be solved exclusively at the FTC. Q: Could you give us your thoughts on network neutrality, a hot-button issue that pits the Googles of the world against the telecom companies (the dispute is over whether the telecom companies can charge Google and others a higher price to deliver their content faster to consumers). A: We put out a report about network neutrality. This is a debate that I think is extremely important. Our recommendation is to exercise extreme caution right now because there is so much we don’t know. Right now we don’t have consumer harm, and it would be difficult to regulate in an area that is moving so quickly. Q: Our understanding is that if nothing is done, then telecom carriers can charge different prices for different speeds. A: I think we should wait to see what the FCC (Federal Communications Commission) and DOJ can do before we need legislation. I’m most worried about the unintended consequences, because there are always unintended consequences when you pass new laws and new regulations in trying to tamp down certain business practices.
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