The New York Times once called former President Barack Obama the “Regulator in Chief,” so why would his administration pass up the chance to regulate Big Tech a decade ago?
“Once a presidential candidate with deep misgivings about executive power, Mr. Obama will leave the White House as one of the most prolific authors of major regulations in presidential history,” The Times said about him in August 2016, citing his “560 major regulations” passed in his first seven years in office.
But despite those hundreds of regulations in Obama’s legacy, the administration let Google amass unchecked power by committing key errors in its investigation and letting the company off the hook, a 312-page cache of confidential internal Federal Trade Commission documents published Tuesday by Politico revealed.
After opening an antitrust probe and spending 19 months investigating, the FTC commissioners voted 5-0 to close the case without further action in January 2013.
Notably, four out of five of those were Obama appointees.
