Andrew Ferguson is the free-speech champion we need at the FTCs helm

Since his unequivocal triumph last month, Donald Trump has been on a tear with his staffing choices, naming aggressive reformers and anti-establishment firebrands to top positions across his incoming administration.On Tuesday, he announced one of his most important selections: the chairmanship of the Federal Trade Commission.Andrew Ferguson, the former Virginia solicitor-general who became a commissioner at the agency earlier this year, will take the helm.For opponents of online censorship, this is exciting news.Ferguson has already demonstrated a key understanding of the forces that propel online censorship in the private sector, zeroing in on collusive behavior in the advertising industry that has driven boycotts against free speech platforms like X.At the same time, Ferguson is aware that the government’s actions can also make problems in the private sector even worse.

In September, he criticized the Democrat-led FTC’s uncritical attitude to “AI safety experts,” who are often little more than DEI-pushers in disguise.“The truth is that these AI safety groups, as they are often called, have proven to be little more than rebranded versions of the DEI bureaucracies that have infected America’s businesses and colleges,” Ferguson wrote.This cognizance of both private-sector and public-sector threats speaks to the future FTC chairman’s pragmatism, and his unwillingness to bind himself to the diktats of any particular ideological camp.This bodes very well — because excessive attachment to any school of thought, particularly on the FTC’s mandate to oversee the private sector on behalf of consumers, can quickly derail efforts to tackle issues like censorship and political bias.When I first began writing about big tech censorship in 2015, the most resistance I faced on the right came from the old school, free-markets-and-deregulation brigade.From their perches in the libertarian think tanks of Washington, DC, this faction reflexively opposed interferenc...