Timothy Muris

Education and early career Muris graduated from Chula Vista High School in Chula Vista, California. He graduated with high honors from San Diego State University in 1971 and received his J.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law in 1974. At UCLA, he was awarded membership in the Order of the Coif and served as an associate editor of the UCLA Law Review. He became senior counsel at Sidley Austin, where his work has focused on antitrust enforcement, mergers, civil investigations, strategic counseling, and consumer protection issues including advertising and privacy regulation. He was succeeded as chairman by Deborah Platt Majoras, who was sworn in on August 16, 2004.

National Do Not Call Registry During Muris's chairmanship, the FTC opened the National Do Not Call Registry for consumer registrations on June 27, 2003. The registry allowed consumers to register phone numbers in order to limit unwanted commercial telemarketing calls. The registry faced legal challenges after its launch, and in February 2004 the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit upheld its constitutionality. By June 2004, consumers had registered 62 million phone numbers. Former FTC Commissioner Thomas B. Leary later described the Do Not Call Rule as the most noteworthy consumer-protection achievement of Muris's tenure.

Consumer protection and privacy agenda In October 2001, Muris announced an FTC privacy agenda that called for increasing agency resources devoted to privacy protection by 50 percent. The agenda emphasized enforcement and consumer education, and included initiatives involving deceptive spam, identity theft, credit reporting accuracy, children's online privacy, enforcement of privacy promises, and the Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act. The Associated Press reported that Muris emphasized stronger enforcement of existing consumer privacy laws rather than seeking broad new Internet privacy legislation.

In 2004, after Congress directed the FTC to study a possible National Do Not Email Registry under the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, the Commission reported that such a registry would fail to reduce spam without email-authentication systems and might increase spam by creating security and privacy risks.

Antitrust policy During Muris's chairmanship, the FTC placed renewed emphasis on antitrust issues involving intellectual property, competition in the health care sector, and administrative litigation.

Selected publications