Federal Trade Commission
90TH Anniversary Symposium
September 22-23, 2004
Opening Remarks
Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras
Good morning. It is my great pleasure to welcome you to our celebration of the 90th
anniversary of the Federal Trade Commission.
In our daily routine, the urgency to address the immediate crisis or deadline generally
presses us to focus on the present, with an occasional glimpse at the future. This week, however,
we have chosen to reflect extensively on the past.
Our first aim is to celebrate the Commission's accomplishments and, more important, to
honor the many individuals who have built and sustained the agency over the past nine decades.
A great institution never forgets that it prospers only by the contributions of those who serve it.
This week, scholarly, social, and ceremonial activities are a modest way to show our respect and
gratitude for the people who invested years of their lives - sometimes entire careers - to create a
better future for consumers. Government officials often are exhorted to pick the low-hanging
fruit. This week, we thank the generations of FTC employees who planted the trees.
Although the perspective of our symposium is strongly historical, its second aim is
emphatically forward-looking. We study the past to increase our understanding of what our
agency must do today and tomorrow to improve the well-being of consumers. My predecessor,
Tim Muris, who conceived this symposium, often emphasized the continuity of modern FTC
policy and underscored the cumulative nature of good governance.(1) Tim stressed the theme that
our greatest achievements have emerged far less from efforts marked by sharp, recurring
discontinuities in philosophy than by the cumulative, progressive search for better practices.
Let me offer another metaphor that, I believe, is true to our history by its power to
highlight how successful programs require continuous, evolutionary improvement. Properly
viewed, those of us fortunate to hold government office are members of a relay team, not
participants in individual events. From this perspective, success stems from the collective effort of
the team, not from individual initiative alone.
For several reasons, I find this metaphor appealing, not just because I recently took the
baton at the FTC. Rather, it illuminates the characteristics of good policy at the FTC and other
government bodies. First, a good relay team demands superior effort from each individual
member, but its overall performance is inherently a collaboration. No team member runs exactly
the same, and no matter how well each performer runs, the significance of the individual
contribution ultimately depends on the performance of the runners who have gone before or
follow.
This should ring true to this audience. It does not take long for any public official to
realize how much she depends on her predecessor and successor. Good policy-making is
frequently and unmistakably cumulative. In the next two days, participants in our Symposium will
examine successful and unsuccessful programs in protecting consumers. They will document the
progression in antitrust enforcement from a focus on protecting competitors to an emphasis on
protecting competition. They will analyze the continuing formulation and reformulation of the
role of economic analysis in FTC thinking. In these and other areas, the cumulative nature of
good policy-making stands out. A recurring admonition in the discrete historical episodes that
will be described is that each leader of this institution should define success in terms of making
contributions to the team's performance.
A second attractive feature of the relay metaphor is its recognition that success is a
product of obvious and non-obvious achievement, alike. At some time, I suspect, all of us have
watched a 4-by-100 meter relay. The sprinting ability of individual runners plainly is important to
the team's success. The grace and power of each runner naturally seizes our attention in
sequence as the race unfolds. Yet success often does not reside solely in the raw speed of
individual runners, but instead depends vitally on a far more mundane exercise - the hand-off.
During the Olympics in Athens, for example, we watched with disappointment as a collection of
dazzling individuals faltered because of a botched exchange.
This, too, provides a powerful message for public leadership at the FTC and other
government bodies. Key elements of good policy-making are not necessarily dramatic or flashy.
There is an inevitable tendency for academics, practitioners, legislators, and even government
officials to measure success by the frequency of the "big case." I do not denigrate the importance
of the big case, no more than I would slight the value of a runner who could cover 100 meters in
9 seconds flat. By the very fact that the big case attracts great public interest or affects a large
segment of the market, it is important to us. The lesson, however, is that the attention devoted to
the big case or other headline-grabbing initiatives can deflect needed attention away from more
subtle but equally necessary steps that agencies must take to achieve good policy results. Like
corporate officers who must resist the temptation to focus only on the next quarterly results, we
must resist the temptation to become heroes by focusing only on the next big, high-profile case.
Our obligation at the FTC is to identify and recognize the equivalents of good "hand-offs"
in the formulation of competition and consumer protection policy. This Symposium demonstrates
how we have achieved many of our greatest successes more through a series of incremental
changes, using all of the policy instruments at our disposal, than through single, discrete, "big
bang" events or measures. "Small" cases, of course, can make big law. In addition, the pivotal
contributions from the application of non-litigation tools such as advocacy, education, and policy
research and development have been significant. Not only is this integration of instruments a
proven path to improvements, but the multidimensional approach to formulating competition and
consumer protection policy is the realization of the model that Congress conceived 90 years ago.
As any junior lawyer or economist quickly learns, the reward for great work is new
challenges. Undoubtedly, our discussions over the next two days will remind us that there is an
enormous amount of work to be done to address current and oncoming policy challenges. As
adjusted over time, the Commission's statutory authority and institutional design have provided
an excellent platform for responding quickly to market changes and confronting new tactics that
harm consumers. What specific challenges does our past experience teach us to anticipate, and
what can we distill from our history about how to respond? I offer two observations.
First, we know that the FTC has a vital role to play in speaking for reliance on market
processes and standing for consumer interests. As I mentioned in my confirmation testimony, our
aim is to develop policies that recognize and take advantage of the remarkable consumer benefits
inherent in the largely decentralized economic organization that is our market system. To serve
their own purposes, however, there are many who try to drive a wedge between business and
consumers, simplistically reducing the equation to good and bad, while ignoring the mutuality and
complexity inherent in the relationship between the two. That false dichotomy is uniquely
uninformative as a basis for deciding how and when the FTC should use its authority. Our
central aim must be to make discriminating judgments that permit us to channel our energies
toward challenging private and public measures that injure consumers.
To an important degree, successful FTC and Justice Department efforts to oppose private
trade restraints have increased the attractiveness to some entities of pursuing public measures to
protect them from the sometimes harsh competitive consequences of the free market. We live in a
city to which all manner of folks flock in search of dispensation. They may say that they believe in
free markets and that they must serve consumers to achieve success, but they are obligated to
pursue their own interests. The FTC has a special charter - to speak for measures that protect the
consumer and the vitality of market forces. The challenge to oppose public policies and actions
that subvert consumer interests is unending. We must never lose our focus, despite pressure from
those who seek exceptional treatment.
Second, our past informs us that effectively meeting future policy challenges depends on
our willingness to invest great effort at improving our base of knowledge and then having the
courage to put it into practice. From the time of its creation to the present, the FTC has lived in a
highly dynamic policy environment. Each decade, we have encountered important changes in
economic and legal theory, economic phenomena including technology that changes the
complexion of commercial transactions, political conditions, and institutional arrangements for
economic policymaking at home and abroad. The basic problems of public administration and
analysis appear again and again, albeit with special and ever more demanding variations.
Our ability to account for these developments demands conscious, continuing efforts to
understand them and to devise appropriate policy responses. We must keep up or, better yet, stay
ahead. The process of regeneration and improvement demands an unflinching willingness to
explore the consequences of our past initiatives, the openness to account for new developments,
and a commitment to explore the interdependencies and infrastructure of policymaking within our
own country and across jurisdictions. Only through a process of deliberate institutional renewal,
self-assessment, and education will we be equal to the challenges that we are sure to face.
The need to improve our knowledge base and to incorporate that knowledge into our
enforcement work proceeds with unequaled urgency today. We can take nothing for granted,
save the need to improve. On countless occasions, by reason of our relatively long and collective
experience, foreign competition and consumer protection authorities - especially newer agencies
- use our experience to inform their own choices concerning institutional design and operational
practice. To exercise leadership in a world of great jurisdictional complexity and dynamism, we
must undertake a continuing process of self-assessment and improvement. Our opinions about
competition and consumer protection policy will be influential only to the extent that foreign
observers perceive the content and implementation of our policies to be worthy of emulation. Our
capacity to persuade today hinges upon, and will continue to require, superior analysis and
demonstrated achievement. Intellectual leadership and proven results, not the sheer volume of
experience, comprise the global currency of policymaking of the present and the future.
And so I invite you to join me over the next two days not only in celebrating what we
have accomplished, but in reflecting upon what we must do to serve consumers well in the future.
Thank you.
Endnote:
1. Timothy J. Muris, Chairman, Federal Trade Commission, How History Informs Practice
- Understanding the Development of Modern U.S. Competition Law, Remarks Before the Fall
Forum of the Section of Antitrust Law of the American Bar Association, Washington, D.C. (Nov.
19, 2003), available at <http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/muris/murisfallaba.pd>; Timothy J. Muris,
Chairman, Federal Trade Commission, Antitrust Enforcement at the Federal Trade Commission:
In a Word - Continuity, Remarks Before the Section of Antitrust Law at the Annual Meeting of
the American Bar Association, Chicago, Illinois (Aug. 7, 2001), available at <http://www.ftc.gov/speeches/muris/murisaba.htm>.
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