Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Edith Ramirez will be
one of two witnesses at the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee's first oversight
hearing of the new Congress, scheduled for Tuesday.
According to the office of Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.),
chair of the subcommittee, she will be joined by William Baer, assistant
attorney general in the antitrust division.
The hearing is intended to solicit input from the regulators
on "promoting competition and cracking down on anticompetitive
practices." The committee's ranking member is Mike Lee (R-Utah).
Klobuchar has had plenty of experience with communications
mergers from her congressional perch as a member of both the Commerce and
Judiciary committees, which share jurisdiction over communications.
Justice and the FTC divvy up antitrust reviews of proposed
mergers, including ones that involve the changing hands of spectrum license,
which the FCC also reviews for public interest concerns beyond issues of
antitrust.
The full Judiciary Committee has already held a
Justice oversight hearing, at which Attorney General Eric Holder told Klobuchar
and others that communications would be one of the sectors onwhich Justice's antitrust division would focus.
