Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission, said Big Tech platforms' practices giving preference to their own products and services on marketplaces they operate is cause for worry and US antitrust laws should be exhausted to tackle such "walled gardens."
Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the US Federal Trade Commission, said Big Tech platforms' practices giving preference to their own products and services on marketplaces they operate is cause for worry, and US antitrust laws should be exhausted to tackle such "walled gardens.""We all should be really concerned as market participants, wherever we are in markets, about the idea that a company could build basically a wall where they invite you in. Once you're in, it's very hard to leave," Ferguson said.
To build things within the walled garden, such platforms either levy a tax or they prevent others from doing it by steering everyone else in the walled garden to their products and services, the FTC chairman said.
"We're going to have sort of an innovative stagnation problem, if we have these platforms that were super innovative for a long time but have ceased to be innovative, and instead sort of keep themselves afloat by taxing innovators or making sure that their potentially competitive products never present a real challenge," he said.
The best way to tackle this is antitrust enforcement rather than ex ante regulation, Ferguson said.
This is because the US remains by far the most dynamic, innovative economy on Earth, he said. Another reason is that the US has prized antitrust enforcement over "heavy-handed regulation."
— Epic Games v. Apple, Google —
Ferguson said he watched the Epic Games smartphone monopolization lawsuits against Google and Apple with great interest.
"I think that these are viable theories," he said.
The FTC chairman said he found it problematic that there is a view among some of the judiciary that, because Apple and Google's operating systems are competitive early on in some sort of transaction chain, they remain competitive even once a user has bought into the system.
"I have my own doubts about that. As a factual matter, the first smartphone I purchased was an Apple in 2012 and I've never gotten out of the ecosystem," Ferguson said.
For a lot of Americans, if they hear that Samsung and Apple and Google continue to compete, they would probably raise an eyebrow a bit, he said.
Ferguson said the antitrust theories in Epic Games lawsuits have "a lot of force" and the way to tackle the companies dominance is to confront them with antitrust laws.
"Now, if it turns out the antitrust laws as currently written are insufficient to protect innovation... and [if] the antitrust laws are not doing enough to promote innovation on these platforms, I do think it's appropriate for Congress to consider alternatives," Ferguson said. "But I think we have to start by exhausting all of the available antitrust rules like Epic did in Epic Games v Google. Obviously we'll see how it turns out an appeal, but I think that that theory shows great promise."
The FTC chairman said the European Union's approach to this is a "cautionary tale," saying it isn't growing and innovating at a high speed. "Certainly not at our rate," he said. "We're trying to keep that sort of pioneering innovative spirit alive."
*Little Tech Competition Summit. Y Combinator: Washington, DC. April 2, 2025.
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