Q&A with former FTC commissioners Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Slaughter, who Trump fired, likely illegally, on Meta, fighting for privacy, and bribes in the US
Nilay Patel / The Verge : Bluesky: @jasonpaul and @reckless . X: @nancyscola Bluesky: Jason Paul / @jasonpaul : Gratuities. Nilay Patel / @reckless : Look there are a lot of other tech and biz podcasts about there but Decoder is the only one where you can hear me ask two FTC commissioners if Mark Zuckerberg just sucks at bribes www.theverge.com/decoder-podc... [image] X: Nancy Scola / @nancyscola : FTC's Rebecca Slaughter on the ‘impossibility’ of federal privacy legislation: “My experience of the legislative process is that it is absolutely torturous and everything is impossible until it's a law. It's never going to happen, and then it's a law.” https://www.theverge.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The conversation lands after years of uneven FTC pressure on Meta: the agency's challenge to the Within deal reflected a more confrontational posture, while reporting found that FTC consent decrees had constrained some data collection but were no longer sufficient.
It also arrives as the commission's agenda is being redirected toward a Big Tech “censorship” inquiry. The former commissioners' emphasis on privacy and the difficulty of passing a federal statute highlights the stakes of personnel changes at an agency still relied on for much of the enforcement work.
First-order effects
- Bedoya and Slaughter's removal ends their ability to shape FTC votes, investigations, and public arguments from inside the commission; the allegation that the firings were unlawful puts the agency's institutional independence under immediate scrutiny.
- The interview gives Meta privacy enforcement and the absence of a federal privacy law renewed visibility, without itself creating a new requirement for Meta or other companies.
Second-order effects
- A commission with different personnel and priorities can alter the continuity of Big Tech oversight, particularly where existing remedies are already viewed as outdated; companies may reassess the regulatory risk attached to data practices.
- With federal privacy legislation still described as politically difficult, shifts in FTC leadership matter more to companies and consumers because there is no identified legislative backstop in this coverage.
Third-order effects
- If commissioner removals become an accepted mechanism for changing agency direction, independent-agency enforcement could become more closely tied to presidential turnover rather than long-lived expertise and consent-order oversight.
- The broader structural issue is whether privacy protections remain dependent on case-by-case FTC enforcement or eventually gain a durable federal legislative foundation; this interview underscores that the latter remains uncertain.
The trend: This is one data point in the politicization of U.S. technology oversight, where personnel control at the FTC can shape the practical direction of privacy enforcement as much as formal legislation does.