EXCLUSIVE — FTC Commissioner Mark Meador said he hopes that the Federal Trade Commission can be a tool to help protect children online just days after the FTC announced a major settlement with pornography giant Aylo.

Meador, 40, spoke to the Washington Examiner at the FTC headquarters last week. A family man with six children, Meador touted ongoing enforcement efforts at the FTC and cases brought recently designed to mitigate harm for children online, including efforts to prevent child sexual abuse material and nonconsensual sexual content online.

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Just last week, the FTC and the state of Utah reached a major settlement with Aylo, the parent company behind Pornhub and dozens of other pornographic websites, over claims it did little to prevent child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and nonconsensual sexual content (NSC).

Aylo was fined $5 million and will be required to establish a program to prevent the distribution of CSAM and NCM online, according to the FTC.

“There’s a much bigger problem with even the quote, unquote, ‘consensual pornography’ that’s out there,” Meador said. “It poses a grave threat to children, but this is the first step that we could take under the powers that we have.”

Meador said that the company had been saying that they policed their websites for illicit content and would verify the ages of people in all the videos, but he said that was not true.

“It was repeated deception as to their efforts, and so we stepped in, we imposed a very strong injunctive order against them that would require extensive compliance efforts on their part to ensure this doesn’t happen again,” the commissioner said.

When asked about what the biggest threats from Big Tech are and what keeps him up at night, he said that protecting families and children is, and will continue to be, a major concern for him while he serves out his 7-year term on the commission.

“I think that’s probably the most pressing concern of our time, is how to protect children online,” Meador said.

Meador said that his only lingering concern with the Aylo case was that the FTC was not able to recover money for the victims because of a Supreme Court ruling on the FTC recovering monetary damages.

“In this instance, we were limited to what the state of Utah was able to recover, which was a modest amount,” he said. “And in the future, I’m hoping that Congress will act and restore that power to the commission, so that we can not only stop that bad conduct, but then recover something for those victims.”

Meador, who was sworn in in April, studied at the University of Chicago as an undergrad and received his law degree from the University of Houston. In addition to working on the staff of Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) and as an attorney at the FTC, he has also worked as a trial attorney at the Justice Department’s antitrust division.

Meador said there is a conversation happening at the national level of what norms society should have in place to safeguard children on the internet. He said that the FTC plays a significant role in that debate.

“There is going to be a lot that families have to decide on their own — individual families and parents working with their children — are going to have to make a decision as to what’s best for them, but we can help by ensuring that bad actors are being stopped and that we are giving them the tools that they need to protect their children adequately,” Meador said.

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Outside of the FTC, Meador also supports the Kids Online Safety Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation that is heavily opposed by Big Tech. The Senate has already voted to approve the legislation, but it hasn’t received House vote.

KOSA would create a “duty of care,” meaning that companies would have to actively “prevent and mitigate” their exposure to content that could be viewed as harmful.