US Federal Trade Commission member Mark Meador said Monday that the goal of competition enforcement isn't to manage the economy but to eradicate illegal practices.
He said at a Washington, DC, event* that officials like himself are neither empowered nor equipped to manage the economy, but enforcers can and should curb abuses of power. Those efforts should come both when going after illegal conduct and challenging mergers, he said.
Companies that dominate a market by having superior products aren't engaging in anticompetitive practices, he said: the problem comes when they engage in “collusive or exclusionary conduct.” Meador added that antitrust enforcement is designed to protect competition, not competitors.
Meador also noted that enforcers are sometimes limited because the antitrust statutes limit what judges can do. And he also noted that judges are not always equipped to handle the increasingly technocratic antitrust enforcement regime.
During a subsequent conversation with former FTC Chairman William Kovacic, Meador said if the agency received additional funding from Congress, he would use it to hire more lawyers.
Meador, a former lawyer at the FTC and US Department of Justice and a former counsel to the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee, was named to the FTC by President Donald Trump last year.
Although he is a conservative, he's angered some of his ideological compatriots by criticizing parts of the consumer welfare standard, which has guided antitrust enforcement since the 1980s. Last year, he told the Conservative Partnership Institute that the definition of consumer welfare commonly used by enforcers “may be one of the greatest slights of hand in modern legal scholarship."
*"Washington Antitrust and Digital Markets Forum," MLex, George Washington University Competition Law Center, Forum Global, Washington, DC; March 23, 2026.
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