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Lina Khan, the youngest person to chair the powerful Federal Trade Commission, has come down hard on monopolies and anticompetitive behavior, so some business leaders and Wall Streeters are nudging Kamala Harris to dump her if the Democrats win the White House.
Kahn, who became FTC chief in 2021 at age 34, declined to comment on the presidential campaign, but told a New York conference, “I think it’s true that, over decades, enforcement has not always been so vigorous, and so that type of change can be uncomfortable for some people.”
LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman came out publicly against Khan in a CNN interview calling her efforts a “war” on corporations. Barry Diller told CNBC, “I think she’s a dope,” but walked the comment back later.
She’s taken on heath care,
A recent story about the FTC chief in The Atlantic is titled “The Wrath At Kahn,” who has pushed back on mergers in health care, semiconductors and supermarkets and, most notably, taken on big tech and social media. A new FTC staff report out today found that “large social media and video streaming companies have engaged in vast surveillance of users with lax privacy controls and inadequate safeguards for kids and teens.”
Khan has bipartisan supporters in Congress.
“I hear routinely from members on both sides of the aisle [who] are hearing from their constituents and communities about how increasingly dominant corporations are able to get away with all sorts of abusive practices, and people don’t have recourse because there’s not much competition in the market,” she said during a Q&A at the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
Democratic Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are, of course, admirers, but so is Donald Trump’s running mate, Sen. J.D. Vance – who said he thinks Khan is the only Biden administration official doing a good job — Sen. Josh Hawley and Rep. Matt Gaetz.
Khan doesn’t find that surprising. “There has long been an American tradition of viewing concentrated economic power and monopolies with some suspicion. And I think, as more of these dominating firms have been gaining power and are being able to exercise it in way that are concretely and materially harming the American people … there is a very organic and grassroots recognition that we need more vigorous enforcement of antitrust laws.”
She also called it “pretty amazing” what the Commission has accomplished during the Biden-Harris administration. “There has been a direct mandate” with President Biden, who appointed Khan, signing an executive order, acknowledging that antitrust policy “had gone astray, and he really directed all his agencies to double down.”
A bipartisan Senate vote approved her, reflecting widespread concern that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple have become too large.
Khan’s 2017 treatise Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox for the Yale Law Journal and other writing staked out her position — that the current antitrust framework, rooted in a consumer welfare standard, has been unable to curb the competitive harms from online platforms in areas such as predatory pricing and exploitation of information. In other words, antitrust law that historically only considered mergers in terms the impact on consumer prices, is not nearly enough anymore.
During her tenure, Nvidia called off a $40 billion acquisition of Arm – which would have been one of the largest semiconductor chip mergers in history – amid regulatory challenges. Biotech company Illumina divested Grail, the cancer test maker it acquired for $7.1 billion in 2021, after a court backed the FTC argument that the deal could harm competition. The FTC sued to block the biggest supermarket merger in U.S. history, Kroger’s $24.6 billion acquisition of Albertsons Companies – calling it anticompetitive.
It’s been so proactive that companies across sectors including media and entertainment have been reluctant to ink deals lest they linger in regulatory purgatory. It’s one reason Sony bowed out of the Paramount fray.
VP Harris, she noted, “often talks about how she used to be an Attorney General, a prosecutor, who has really focused on making sure that corporations are not able to get way with breaking the law … be it the major banks, or pharma companies. And so I’m confident, especially given the strong bipartisan agreement we see on how important these issues are, that for many, many years to come we’re going continue to see robust commitment to vigorous antitrust enforcement and continuing this work.”
Apple shut down her appearance on a Jon Stewart podcast, according to the comedian. On an episode of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show earlier this year, with Khan as a guest, he said Apple shut down an interview with Khan on the podcast of his subsequently canceled Apple TV+ comedy show The Problem With Jon Stewart. “I wanted to have you on a podcast and Apple asked us not to do it.”
“I think it just shows the danger of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision making in a small number of companies,” Khan said.
