During the prior administration, most of the action in the area of competition among online services was happening at the FCC, which brought the hammer down on Comcast's user throttling and waded into the deep end of the net neutrality debate. In an interview Conducted with C-SPAN over the weekend, the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Jon Leibowitz, suggested that the new administration has given his organization free rein to aggressively pursue a variety of online malfeasance, and that he planned on taking advantage of it.

Leibowitz has actually been with the FTC since 2004, but was promoted to Chair in early March of this year. He has prior experience working on antitrust issues for Congress, but his most recent position prior to the FTC was as the MPAA's liaison with Congress.

In general, Leibowitz staked out a line that wouldn't have seemed out of place during the Bush years, saying, "we believe in self-regulation, so long as it's vigorous." But he also made clear that a deregulated market needed a set of rules to restrain the major players from harming consumers, and he views the FTC as playing a critical role in enforcing those rules. As such, he said several times that he was looking for any regulatory frameworks passed by Congress to include giving the FTC the ability to levy fines in order to provide a strong disincentive.

But he also sounded far from convinced that the market for Internet service was competitive enough to ensure the sort of competition that ensures self-regulation. When asked whether there was enough competition in the broadband market, Leibowitz recognized that the cable/telco duopoly meant that we effectively had two competing forms of access, and having more—"three is better than two"—would go a long way towards improving matters. Without that competition, in his view, FTC might need to come off the sidelines in order to protect consumers. "In a perfect marketplace where you had more competitors, you wouldn't need the government to necessarily be terribly involved," he said, implying that it might need to get involved in a market with fewer.

In the absence of competition, Leibowitz will be watching for anticompetitive measures that could harm the consumer, such as a ISPs favoring specific content or applications, which sounds like net neutrality from here. As Liebowitz put it, "we haven't seen discrimination yet, but it could raise antitrust issues if we do see it."

That doesn't mean that he's necessarily against any measures by ISPs to manage network traffic. He suggested that things like usage caps and tiered service pricing were perfectly acceptable, provided consumers knew exactly what they were signing up for—extra fees for heavy use are fine, provided that the consumer is aware of them before they show up on the bill for the first time..

Leibowitz's suggestion that the lack of competition among ISPs may cause issues on antitrust grounds was especially notable. The FTC is already active in the antitrust arena, having started an investigation into the interlocking directorates that may see Apple and Google disentangling their boards. But itmay be a sign of a more general change in the approach towards this corner of the legal system. The New York Times is reporting that the Department of Justice is among the federal agencies that are completely revamping their approach to antitrust enforcement, in line with a general unwillingness to wait for market forces to sort out economic issues.

From the sound of it, many of the companies that have faced skepticism in the European Union, like Microsoft and Intel, could be subject to the same sort of scrutiny at home. And, if Leibowitz's interview is any indications, the US-based ISPs may also wind up in the crosshairs should they attempt to implement any sort of traffic manipulation that the FTC deems anti-consumer.