Welcome to another M-Lex podcast. I'm Leah Nylon,

EMPLX's Chief Global Antitrust Correspondent, based in Washington, D.C.

And I'm Mike Swift, M-Lex's chief global digital risk correspondent based in San Francisco.

2017 was a year of big changes in the U.S. legal and regulatory area, in large part because

of the deregulatory efforts of Republican President Donald Trump, who took over in January.

In the antitrust world, the year could best be described as getting off to a slow start

and ending with fireworks.

And in the realm of privacy and data security, 2017 is likely to be remembered as the year

of the data breach suit and perhaps the end of net neutrality. Stay tuned on that one.

Just in case you weren't paying as close attention as Leah and I were to antitrust and privacy news,

we're here to recap for you the biggest trends and stories from 2017.

So Leah, at the beginning of 2017, the big question for everyone in the antitrust world was what would Donald Trump's antitrust approach be?

What have we learned in the first year of the Trump administration?

So we've definitely learned a couple things, but there are still various moving pieces.

So Trump has yet to put his mark on the FTC. He nominated Joseph Simons.

He's a partner at Paul Weiss to be chairman and Roheet Chopra to fill out one of the open

Democratic spots. He named these folks in October, but those nominations still haven't yet been sent to the Senate,

which is a procedural step that has to happen before they can actually be

voted on right now the FTC is a little bit hamstrung it only has two

commissioners acting chairman Maureen Olhausen who's a Republican and Teryl

McSweeney who's a Democrat so in general both of them have to agree for

anything at the FTC to get done and that has been slowing things down a little.

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