Democrats regain majority on Commission after a contentious nomination process
By: SSN Staff
After months of Commerce Committee gridlock and COVID-19 delays, Alvaro M. Bedoya was confirmed as Federal Trade Commissioner on May 11 by the U.S. Senate. Vice President Kamala Harris broke the 50-50 party-line vote to secure Bedoya as Rohit Chopra’s replacement to the five-person Commissioner’s table, which gave the Democrats a 3-2 majority vote.
Bedoya’s area of expertise is privacy law as it relates to Big Tech. The 40-year-old Yale Law School graduate was the founding director of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law School, where he currently serves as a visiting professor. There, he co-authored an investigatory paper looking at the race and gender bias inherent in facial recognition technologies, which led to hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, new laws curtailing the technology, and a comprehensive audit of the Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
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