by Sean Moran at Breitbart
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Andrew Ferguson on Monday announced that, as part of the FTC’s approval of a merger between two of the largest advertising companies, the advertising giants agreed not to collude or discriminate based on political or ideological viewpoints.
The FTC noted that the two advertising companies were founding members of a cross-industry initiative called GARM through which there was collusion to blacklist center-right outlets such as Breitbart News, Fox News, and the Daily Wire.
Ferguson announced that the FTC had extracted a major victory as part of the agency’s agreement for Omnicom and IPG to merge. The two advertising firms comprise a third of the world’s “Big Six” advertising firms. As part of the merger agreement, the firms said they would not agree to or maintain any practice to discriminate based on political viewpoints.
The FTC chairman wrote that there has been a history of “collusion in the [advertising] market for media-buying services, and the increased potential for collusion post-merger make this a rare instance where the imposition of a behavioral remedy is appropriate.”
He explained:…
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