Deborah Platt Majoras Exiting Federal Trade Commission

Federal Trade Commission chairman Deborah Platt Majoras will step down next month, the agency said Thursday.

Majoras, who has been chairman since August 2004, wil join Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati as VP and general counsel. She will be prevented from lobbying or practicing before the FTC for one year..

P&G is one of the companies she pushed to self-regulate food marketing practices in an effort to help combat the childhood-obesity issue.

Late last year, Majoras took heat from media activists after she said she would not recuse herself from reviewing the Google-DoubleClick merger.

The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy had asked her to excuse herself from reviewing Google's $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick, saying there was a conflict of interest because her husband was a partner in law firm Jones Day, and that firm's Web site said the company was retained to advise DoubleClick in the merger.

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.