Former congressman and possible incoming Attorney General grilled FTC Chair Lesa Khan back in 2023 during a House Judiciary Committee Hearing. “You are a brilliant woman with a tremendous ability to impact how consumers are going to interface with the digital world for a long time to come,” he said.
It’s a startling compliment for a representative more known for investigations into his ethics, his rumored love of orgies, and his alleged propensity to show fellow legislators nudes in the Congressional cloakroom. During the hearing, Gaetz took a stab at Khan over how the FTC handled Twitter but then spent the bulk of his time praising how she handled Ring and data brokers. He called them evil companies.
Gaetz, like many of America’s legislators, is a weirdo. He also seems to really hate Big Tech and has voted against them. He’s even gone against his party several times in the past few years to attempt to force Big Tech to change.
“Some say *sue* Big Tech. I say BREAK UP Big Tech!” Gaetz said in a post on X in 2021.
In the 2023 hearing, Gaetz laid out the case against the databroker Kochava. The FTC sued the databroker in 2022 for selling the geolocation data of hundreds of millions of American cell phones. “Kochava’s data can reveal people’s visits to reproductive health clinics, places of worship, homeless and domestic violence shelters, and addiction recovery facilities,” the lawsuit said. “The FTC alleges that by selling data tracking people, Kochava is enabling others to identify individuals and exposing them to threats of stigma, stalking, discrimination, job loss, and even physical violence.”
Gaetz agreed. “The American people should know that Kochava geolocates where people go to church and then they sell that data to commercial enterprises. That’s real creepy,” he told Khan in 2023.
“We didn’t like it when the FBI was wantin’ to infiltrate the Catholic churches. And I don’t know that I want the data brokers to do the same. And by the way we’ve even seen how the FBI is using the data brokers to do an end run around the 4th Amendment,” he said. “I really want to encourage your work in this space and I hope your investigation against Kochava is something that creates precedent.”
Gaetz is right. The FBI is, in fact, buying U.S. location data from third-party data brokers as a way to get around the 4th Amendment, which protects Americans from unreasonable search and seizure. It has admitted to doing this in government reports, stating that it’s easier than obtaining a warrant.
A pressing question is how much Gaetz would care about this when he’s the one in charge of the FBI. People do not tend to give up power once it’s obtained.
He was also a member of the House’s Antitrust Subcommittee and often bucked his party when it came time to vote to restrain corporate power. He voted in favor of the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, which increased the fees on a company looking to acquire its competitors. He voted against adding loopholes for Big Tech in other bills, voted to end forced arbitration clauses for sexual harassment and sexual assault cases in the workplace, and wrote a brief arguing that the FTC should ban noncompete contracts.
“It is my belief that the number one threat to our liberty is big government. It is also my belief that the number two big threat to our liberty is big business, when big business is able to use the apparatus of government to wrap around its objectives,” Gaetz said in 2019, arguing against the corporate use of forced arbitration clauses.
Forced arbitration has been a hot issue lately. It’s the clause in the fine print of so many of our Terms of Service that stops us from suing a company when we’re upset with them and, instead, forces us into arbitration. When Disney attempted to avoid responsibility for the death of a woman in its theme park because she’d once signed up for a Disney+ trial subscription, forced arbitration was the mechanism it used.
It’s unclear how Gaetz would wield the powers of Attorney General, but we can make the educated guess that it would be not be good. Trump nominated him because he’s loyal, not because he’s a crusader against Big Tech. There’s a lot of pending litigation against Trump and, despite the fact that he’ll soon be a sitting president, I expect there will be more. Should Gaetz be confirmed, which is far from certain, then he’d undoubtedly work to shield the man who got him the job from any kind of prosecution or oversight.
But Gaetz may also work to dismantle Big Tech and wield the FTC against corporations who have held a lot of power over Americans for decades. “If the laws are insufficient to stop data brokers from selling information about where my constituents worship and if the laws are insufficient to stop Ring from these activities, I really hope you’ll work with us to change those laws,” he told Khan in 2023.
