An Unalloyed Bit of Good News

Lina Khan, who shot to fame when her article in the Yale Law Review, Amazon's Antitrust Paradox, mainstreamed an new (actually old, pre-1970) and aggressive anti-trust policy.

Since then she has been a leading voice in the movement for forceful and expansive enforcement of anti-monopoly enforcement, and now, she has been confirmed as Chair of the FTC.

Hopefully, this presages a much more assertive approach to monopolies by the agency:

In a move that heralds a growing effort to check the power and influence of Big Tech, President Biden on Tuesday appointed Lina Khan, a top antagonist of the tech industry, to chair the Federal Trade Commission, the federal government’s primary antitrust watchdog.

Biden’s decision to put Khan in charge of the FTC’s agenda is the clearest sign yet that his administration will take a drastically different approach to regulating the tech giants than did President Barack Obama, whose administration took a largely hands-off approach toward Silicon Valley.

………

Khan, 32, is known for her unconventional proposals to counter the tech giants’ power. While still in law school in 2017, she wrote a paper denouncing Amazon for what she said was anti-competitive behavior and suggesting U.S. anti-competition laws were poorly equipped to counter the world of e-commerce. (Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Here proposal is not all unconventional. It was a pretty standard view of anti-trust before Robert Bork and Evil Minions^™ perverted the field.

………

During her confirmation hearing, she signaled she would take a tough line on regulating tech giants. She said that in the past few years, new evidence has come to light showing there were “missed opportunities” for enforcement actions against tech companies under the Obama administration. She also said new findings show the FTC must be “much more vigilant” when it comes to large acquisitions in digital markets.

Khan also said she was particularly concerned about the ways in which large companies use their dominance in one market to give them an upper hand in others, an issue under intense scrutiny by Congress.

Hopefully, this presages an extremely muscular by the Federal Trade Commission.