FTC Chief Lina Khan Knows Strong Antitrust Enforcement ‘May Be Uncomfortable for Some’

Lina Khan, the youngest person to ever serve as chairwoman of the powerful Federal Trade Commission, has been a vocal critic of monopolies and anti-competitive behavior, prompting pressure from some business leaders and Wall Street brokers for Kamala Harris to step down from her post if Democrats win the presidential election.

Kahn, who became FTC chief in 2021 at age 34, declined to comment on the presidential campaign, but said at a conference in New York: “I think it’s true that over the decades, enforcement hasn’t always been as vigorous, so these types of changes can be uncomfortable for some people.”

LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman came out publicly against Khan in an interview with CNN, calling her actions a “war” on corporations. Barry Diller told CNBC, “I think she’s an idiot,” but later walked back the comment.

She took up health care,

A recent article about the FTC chief in The Atlantic is titled “Anger at Kahn,” who has opposed mergers in health care, semiconductors and supermarkets, and has primarily targeted big tech and social media. A new FTC staff report released today found that “large social media and streaming video companies have exercised broad surveillance over their users, with weak privacy controls and inadequate safeguards for children and teens.”

Khan has supporters in Congress regardless of party.

“I regularly hear from members of both sides of the political spectrum (who) hear from their constituents and communities how increasingly dominant corporations are getting away with all kinds of abuses and people have no recourse because there’s not a lot of competition in the marketplace,” she said during a Q&A at the Fast Company Innovation Festival.

Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are obviously admirers, but so are Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, Sen. J.D. Vance — who has 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 this surprising. “There’s a long-standing tradition in America of viewing concentrated economic power and monopolies with some suspicion. And I think as more and more of these dominant companies gain power and are able to exercise it in ways that concretely and materially harm Americans … there’s a very organic and grassroots recognition that we need more vigorous antitrust enforcement.”

She also called it “pretty amazing” what the Commission has accomplished during the Biden-Harris administration. “There was a direct mandate” from President Biden, who appointed Khan, signing an executive order acknowledging that antitrust policy “had gone astray and really telling all of his agencies to redouble their efforts.”

The Senate voted unanimously to approve her nomination, reflecting widespread concerns that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple had become too big.

Khan’s 2017 treatise Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox for the Yale Law Journal and other journals that have made her case—that the current antitrust framework, rooted in a consumer welfare standard, has failed to limit competitive harm from online platforms in areas such as predatory pricing and information exploitation. In other words, antitrust law, which has historically considered mergers only in terms of their impact on consumer prices, is no longer sufficient.

During her tenure, Nvidia called off its $40 billion acquisition of Arm — which would have been one of the largest chip mergers in history — amid regulatory challenges. Biotech company Illumina shed Grail, a maker of cancer tests it acquired for $7.1 billion in 2021, after a court backed the FTC’s argument that the deal could harm competition. The FTC sued to block the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history, Kroger’s $24.6 billion takeover of Albertsons Companies — calling it anticompetitive.

It was so proactive that companies across sectors, including media and entertainment, were reluctant to make deals lest they get stuck in regulatory purgatory. That’s one reason Sony backed down from its fight with Paramount.

VP Harris, she noted, “often talks about how she used to be attorney general, a prosecutor who really focused on making sure corporations couldn’t break the law…whether it was big banks or pharmaceutical companies. And that’s why I’m confident, especially given the strong bipartisan agreement that we’re seeing on how important these issues are, that we’re going to continue to see a strong commitment to vigorous antitrust enforcement and continuing to do that work for many, many years to come.”

According to the comedian, Apple blocked her from appearing on Jon Stewart’s podcast. In the Comedy Central episode Daily program earlier this year, with Khan as a guest, said Apple had shut down an interview with Khan on the podcast of his later-cancelled Apple TV+ comedy show The Problem with Jon Stewart“I wanted you to be on the podcast, but Apple asked us not to.”

“I think it shows the danger of having so much power and so much decision-making concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies,” Khan said.