Biden to name big tech antitrust foe Lina Khan to FTC
President Joe Biden will nominate Columbia Law School Professor Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, arming the agency with an antitrust expert who rose to prominence by warning about the power of dominant technology companies.
The White House on Monday announced Biden’s intent to nominate Khan to the five-member agency. He has yet to pick a permanent head of the commission.
Khan’s selection for the FTC and the hiring of Columbia Law School’s Tim Wu as a White House adviser signal Biden is prepared to pursue a more interventionist antitrust agenda in which officials are quicker to challenge mergers and instances of market power by dominant companies.
Khan’s confirmation would place at the top of U.S. competition policy circles a proponent of breaking up technology giants to protect competition in digital markets. She is at the forefront of a school of antitrust thinking that says the traditional playbook for policing mergers and anticompetitive conduct is failing to do its job.
Khan’s nomination comes as leadership of the FTC is in flux. The agency, which is being run by Acting Chairwoman Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, is evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. Biden must pick a permanent chair and fill one other open seat on the commission. He has nominated FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra to run the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
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Still in her early 30s, Khan burst onto the scene in 2017 with a paper she wrote as a Yale University law student on Amazon.com Inc. The paper, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” outlined how the current framework for assessing harm to competition shields digital platforms from antitrust scrutiny by government enforcers despite the power they wield.
Khan went on to work at Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank in Washington, and worked as an adviser to Chopra. More recently she was a counsel on the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel, which conducted a 16-month investigation of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc., Apple Inc. and Amazon.
Khan was one of the authors of the panel’s report on the investigation, which accused the tech firms of abusing their roles as gatekeepers in the digital economy and in the process eroding innovation, entrepreneurship, privacy and consumer choice. It also included a series of recommendations for antitrust reforms from restricting mergers to breaking up digital platforms.