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Just before Halloween in 2013, Lina Khan He strolled through the large selection of sweets from his local Safeway supermarket and came out with a haunting revelation.
The approximately 40 brands of sweets on the shelves only offer a mirage of consumer choice; they were actually owned by only two or three pastry chefs. Khan, a junior policy analyst at the time, was as dismayed as she was wrote about it in Time magazine. “If we want a healthier, more diverse market, and more variety in our Halloween cubes, we could start reviving some of our antitrust laws.”
Khan’s critique of corporate power has gone far beyond Big Candy. He has explored issues of concentration and monopolistic behaviors in sectors ranging from airlines to poultry and metals, and has drawn similar conclusions. And he began to train his attention on the excessive influence of the market Great computer company, eventually becoming one of his most vocal and prominent critics.
Then when Khan, who is only 32, was this week touched by U.S. President Joe Biden, to chair the Federal Trade Commission, the top regulator of competition, sent shock waves to Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. The predominant expectation is that it will now attempt to usher in a new era of antitrust application in America.
“She’s in the lead now and she’s scared,” says Robert Kaminski, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, a policy research group in Washington. “He has the hammer and everything he sees is key,” he adds.
Khan was born and raised in London, of Pakistani parents; the family moved to the US when he was 11 years old. The first indication of his interest in unfair business behavior came soon.
A Starbucks coffee shop across the street from Mamaroneck High School on the northeastern outskirts of New York City prevented teens from sitting down because they were too turbulent. There was a furor, which Khan reported in his school diary and which was later picked up by the New York Times.
Khan would continue to attend Williams College, where he studied political theory. After graduating, he came to Washington, with a job at the New America Foundation, a center-left think tank, which allowed him to research entrepreneurship and competition.
“Where we had a lot of independent companies, a lot of local companies, a lot of variety,” he said dit in 2012, “now we only see a handful of companies controlling almost every industry.”
Khan finally landed at Yale Law School and in January 2017 published an article in the Yale Law Journal that would catapult her to fame: “Amazon’s antitrust paradox”.
The piece went viral. “This can almost be thought of as the first article of what quickly became a kind of renaissance of antitrust revisionism,” says Robert Hockett, a professor of corporate law at Cornell University.
At the heart of Khan’s philosophy is the idea that companies, including Amazon, have benefited from lax antitrust scrutiny for decades, a period during which low consumer prices became the dominant factor in the time to establish competition policy. She envisions a different antitrust regime, similar to that which existed in the early twentieth century, when the American authorities did not hesitate to break the monopolies.
Amazon declined to comment on its quote.
“What it does is simply return antitrust and market policy to the status quo ante, from the 1920s to the 1960s, even the 1970s,” says David Singh Grewal, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley.
People who know Khan, who is married to a cardiologist, describe her as modest and even a little reserved.
“He really maintains a private life that’s private,” Grewal says. “It’s easy to think of it as the face of the ‘millennial,’ sometimes called the ‘hipster,’ antitrust, but it’s so different from the social media phenomenon driven by the personality that surrounds it.”
After graduating in law, Khan became a professor at Columbia and also worked with the Open Markets Institute, a Washington antitrust think tank. At Capitol Hill, he helped develop the probe of the antitrust subcommittee of the Big Tech house judiciary. Many Republicans are still wary. “His views on antitrust law enforcement are also out of step with a prudent approach to the law,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said in March.
But Khan’s position skyrocketed in democratic circles and went beyond traditional critics of big technologies, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, to include more politicians like Biden. Still, while she was expected to earn a spot in the FTC as a commissioner, few predicted she would be chosen to lead the agency.
“She’s really managed to get up so fast. And I’d attribute that to the fact that she’s just incredibly visionary,” says Kate Judge, a law professor at Columbia University.
Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Freedoms Project, calls Khan the “Simone Biles” of the antitrust, in reference to the U.S. Olympic gymnast. “Demonstrating that America has this crisis of mass concentration. . . it helped to make people in the most traditional way of democratic circles realize that a complete turn of the page was necessary. . . And that she was the obvious one who helped lead this. “
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