Mark Meador

Hmm.

[sighs] You know, if you look at what they say, I think in particular, Mark Meador, FTC Commissioner Meador, um, if you look at what he's been saying, he wants, I think, to hew very closely to the methodological approach that we were using.

I think he does respect the idea of precedent.

He is a principled conservative.

Ferguson's a little different.

To me, that's a trickier one because, you know, I think that right now the other obvious choice is Commissioner Meador.

On the other hand, From everything I've been hearing, he seems unlikely to be the next chairman and doesn't always see eye to eye with Ferguson.

We saw some dissents recently.

Both agency leadership have been really, vocal about, you know, come in, talk to us, work with us, help fix your deal.

If that's a path to close for merging parties, that might be something you pursue now in this environment, even when you might have gotten through a second request without a challenge in a prior universe.

And the second aspect is, you know, for vertical cases, Karina, you mentioned the vertical merger in the quantum computing space where, you know, Ferguson and Mark Meador reached different opinions and with only two commissioners, that wasn't enough to move forward.

But, you know, we saw this in a couple FTC mergers where you have behavioral remedies of non-discrimination, interoperability, and data sharing.