Bush administration to nominate Deborah Majoras to replace resigning chairman U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chairman Timothy Muris announced his resignation Tuesday, saying he will step down mid-year as head of the agency in charge of enforcing a variety of antitrust and consumer-protection laws.Muris did not name a reason for his departure in his official statement, but in an interview Tuesday with The Wall Street Journal he said he will return to the law faculty of George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia.The FTC said the Bush administration intends to nominate Deborah Majoras as Muris’ replacement. As a deputy assistant attorney general with the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Majoras oversaw the department’s prosecution of Microsoft Corp. for antitrust abuses. She left the DOJ last year for a position with law firm Jones Day’s Washington, D.C., practice. If confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Majoras would pick up the rest of Muris’ seven-year term, ending in September 2008.The DOJ’s current antitrust head, R. Hewitt Pate, said in a written statement that he looks forward to once again working with Majoras on antitrust enforcement, in her likely new role at the FTC.The most public achievement of Muris’ FTC was its implementation last year of a “Do Not Call” registry to block telemarketing calls. More than 55 million phone numbers had been placed on the registry by the end of 2003. The FTC also has a lobbying and enforcement hand in laws regulating a number of Internet-related issues, including spam, peer-to-peer file sharing and online pornography. It instigated a civil penalty that made headlines earlier this month by fining Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates $800,000 for violating stock-buying requirements in his purchase of shares in pharmaceutical company ICOS Corp. Technology Industry