President Joe Biden plans to nominate Lina Khan, a Columbia law professor and progressive champion of the antitrust movement, to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), Politico reports. Progressives against big tech and for anti-monopolism praised this decision on Tuesday.
Khan is a “progressive superstar,” ProPublica senior reporter and editor Jesse Eisinger wrote. She first became well known in the law and big tech spheres for her 2017 article published in The Yale Law Journal, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which challenged American antitrust law and its ability to handle companies like Amazon.
In the article, Khan argued that American antitrust laws are not equipped to handle a company like Amazon, which has monopoly-like power despite not looking like a traditional monopoly.
“In her telling, monopolies don’t just exploit consumers and workers in their part of the economy. Even when they offer low prices to consumers, their influence propagates through the entire system,” wrote The Atlantic’s Robinson Meyer in 2018.
Khan’s Yale Law Journal article was praised by experts in business and law as “remarkable,” wrote one Washington Post journalist. A New York Times profile stated that Khan’s article “reframed decades of monopoly law.” When the article was published, Khan was only in her third year of law school.
Since then, Khan has emerged as a leading figure in the antitrust movement. Sarah Miller, director of the American Economic Liberties Project, called her the “intellectual architect of the bipartisan suits against Facebook and Google” in a statement on Tuesday.
Last year, the FTC and Justice Department filed antitrust suits against Google and Facebook, and big tech CEOs were grilled by Congress over their company’s wide-reaching effects on the market. When the House Judiciary Committee put forth recommendations for legislation and reforms to encourage competition, Khan helped to craft that report.
Her appointment, in combination with Biden’s pick of another outspoken antitrust lawyer, Tim Wu, as a White House economic adviser, could signal that Biden is planning to take a more aggressive stance toward big tech than his predecessors. The picks represent, as Politico wrote, “a massive shift in philosophy away from the era of Barack Obama, who proudly forged an alliance between the Democratic Party and Big Tech.”
Biden’s plans to pick Khan for one of the five FTC spots is “the biggest news in antitrust in a year already filled with antitrust news,” wrote Brian Fung, a CNN tech reporter.
Anti-monopolist Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout wrote that Khan and Wu are “extraordinary, powerful choices by Biden. It gives hope that the last 40 years of consumer welfarism in antitrust could be on its last legs, and that we can start enforcing existing laws with vigor.” Short-term market decisions underscore current antitrust laws, due to a Ronald Reagan-era change that paved the way for thousands of mergers in the ensuing decades.
Khan, along with Wu and Vanita Gupta, a Biden pick for the Justice Department who’s also been critical of big tech, could help to usher in a new era for regulation of monopolies, progressives hope. As the Justice Democrats wrote, “This is a major progressive pick by the Biden administration to check the concentration of corporate power and uplift working families.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re shoring up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy