By Annys Shin, Washington Post Staff Writer
The chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, Deborah Platt Majoras, plans to step down next month, the agency announced yesterday.
Majoras, 44, will join Procter & Gamble in June as vice president and general counsel, with primary responsibility for its global antitrust and litigation practice areas, company spokeswoman Robyn Schroeder said.
The White House has not named a replacement, FTC spokeswoman Nancy Judy said. A successor will likely be one of the two other Republican commissioners, William E. Kovacic and J. Thomas Rosch. Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour is an independent, and Jonathan Leibowitz is the panel’s lone Democrat. The commission can function without a chair, Judy said.
During Majoras’s four-year tenure, companies such as DirecTV and Ameriquest Mortgage paid millions in fines to settle charges of illegal telemarketing. Zango, the world’s largest distributor of adware, paid a $3 million fine over allegations it installed ads on millions of computers without their owners’ knowledge. The FTC also brought cases against several pharmaceutical companies, alleging that they paid generic-drug makers in an effort to keep generic versions of brand-name medications off the market.
Majoras also endured her share of controversy. Lawmakers and consumer groups were outraged after the FTC concluded that the oil industry did not engage in price gouging after Hurricane Katrina. The FTC faced criticism for tackling childhood obesity by calling on soda, cereal and snack-food companies to change their marketing practices, an approach favored by the industry but not consumer groups who view self-regulation as too weak.
Representatives for Internet service providers such as AT&T, Qwest and Alcatel-Lucent praised Majoras’s stance against “net neutrality” regulations that try to ensure that providers don’t favor certain kinds of content over others.
In the area of enforcement, they said the FTC was slow to scrutinize data brokers that aggregate and sell personal information. Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the agency ignored its 2004 request to investigate data broker practices. In 2006, the FTC fined ChoicePoint, the nation’s largest data broker, $10 million, but only after news reports surfaced that the company had sold the dossiers of more than 100,000 consumers to identify thieves. More…
Loading ...
0 Responses to “Federal Trade Commission Chair Resigning”