In 2021, Lena Khan was appointed by President Biden to chair the Federal Trade Commission, making her a powerful figure in antitrust enforcement. Despite the challenges of being a small agency against well-resourced monopolies, Lena sees parallels between the current era and the Gilded Age. Her job is to investigate companies, review mergers, and file lawsuits if antitrust laws are broken. Lena aims to enforce antitrust law more aggressively and expand it beyond the consumer welfare standard. The merger guidelines serve as the government's antitrust manual, outlining the investigation process and red flags for anti-competitive mergers.
When Lina Khan was in law school back in 2017, she wrote a law review article called 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,' that went kinda viral in policy circles. In it, she argued that antitrust enforcement in the U.S. was behind the times. For decades, regulators had focused narrowly on consumer welfare, and they'd bring companies to court only when they thought consumers were being harmed by things like rising prices. But in the age of digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook, Khan argued in the article, the time had come for a more proactive approach to antitrust.
Just four years later, President Biden appointed Lina Khan to be the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the main government agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust in America, putting her in the rare position of putting some of her ideas into practice.
Now, two years into the job, Khan has taken some big swings at big tech companies like Meta and Microsoft. But the FTC has also faced a couple of big losses in the courts. On today's show, a conversation with FTC Chair Lina Khan on what it's like to try to turn audacious theory into bureaucratic practice, the FTC's new lawsuit against Amazon, and what it all means for business as usual.
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