Progressive Spotlight: Lina Khan.

Lina Khan seemingly did the impossible.

During her tenure as Federal Trade Commission chair under the Biden administration, Khan transformed a historically boring regulatory arm into one of the most consequential and, dare we say, electrifying agencies inside the federal government.

For many, she was the best part of the Biden administration, which struggled with implementing its major economic package—with its failures most glaringly characterized by its obsequiousness to the Senate parliamentarian over a federal minimum wage hike—and provided cover for Israel’s right-wing government during its genocide in Gaza.

Khan, who became the youngest FTC chair in history at 32, not only gave people on the left a sense of hope, but proved that change inside government is possible, so long as people are brave enough to challenge those with massive influence and even greater wealth.

Making Corporate Giants Sweat: The FTC’s New Enforcement Era

Unapologetically pro-consumer, she targeted the biggest and most parasitic companies in the United States (ahem, Amazon), had CNBC and the Wall Street Journal spitting up their coffees nearly every morning, blocked potential monopolistic mergers, aggressively sought to make the economy fairer for working people and, perhaps most importantly, returned credibility to an agency that had long acted as a rubber stamp for major corporations.

Thanks in large part to the efforts of Khan and the Department of Justice’s chief antitrust enforcer, Jonathan Kanter, the Biden administration brought actions against the largest tech companies in the world, including Meta, Google, and Amazon.

As many on the left gushed over her leadership at the FTC, she often offered the same refrain to questions about how she was able to take on corporate interests so aggressively: That she was simply doing the job of an FTC chair, following the laws entrusted by Congress, and acting on behalf of the American people.

Here were some of the major victories the FTC tallied under Khan’s leadership:

• The blocked Kroger-Albertsons merger: “This historic win protects millions of Americans across the country from higher prices for essential groceries—from milk, to bread, to eggs—ultimately allowing consumers to keep more money in their pockets,” Khan said.
• At least 19 planned mergers were abandoned as a result of the agency’s enforcement policies, including a proposed deal between Lockheed Martin and Aerojet Rocketdyne (terminated as a result of an FTC suit), underscoring the impact of greater regulatory scrutiny and updated merger guidelines.
• The creation of a “click-to-cancel” rule to make it as easy for consumers to end subscriptions as it is to start one, which a federal appeals court recently struck down because of disagreement over its overall financial impact.

This doesn’t even include one of the most far-reaching ongoing Biden-era FTC lawsuits: FTC (and 17 states) vs. Amazon, in which Khan accused the company of operating an illegal monopoly and artificially raising prices across the internet through its practices.

An episode of News Beat podcast featuring David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, broke down the FTC suit against Amazon, explaining:

“Amazon, according to the FTC complaint, has genuinely convinced wide swaths of the population that its site is the mecca of bargain prices. In reality, Amazon sets policies and uses its power to raise the cost of products across the web through relationships with third-party sellers, the complaint alleges. These small businesses buy ads on the platform to appear higher in searches and utilize Amazon’s fulfillment services to ensure they’re Prime-eligible. They’re also penalized if they sell their goods at a cheaper price elsewhere.”

“In other words,” Dayen said, “Amazon says to its sellers: You have to sell for the lowest possible price here—they used to do it explicitly. And after there were antitrust concerns about that, they took that away. But the way they do it now is they crawl the web, they look at all the prices that sellers are selling for, and if they see another price that is lower somewhere else on the internet, they down-rank that individual’s product, so that essentially is not seen on Amazon anymore. So this tends to keep sellers keeping their prices high elsewhere, even in places that don’t take as big a cut as Amazon.”

The New Brandeis Movement Takes Washington

The suit was decades in the making for Khan, who rose to fame with her viral 2017 Yale Law Journal article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which previewed her framework for challenging monopoly power. It also put Khan at the center of the “New Brandeis” movement of anti-monopoly thinkers in the United States, which also included the DOJ’s Kanter.

“In some ways,” Khan wrote, “the story of Amazon’s sustained and growing dominance is also the story of changes in our antitrust laws.”

Speaking to News Beat, Dayen said the movement “has really taken the idea that, actually, we should follow the law more as it’s written than how it was interpreted by (failed U.S. Supreme Court nominee) Robert Bork. And if there are violations that are attempting to create a monopoly, or that are using monopoly power in a way that harms competition, we are going to enforce that. And that is true of not just the [DOJ’s] Google case, and not just the Amazon case, but a host of cases that they have brought before judges.”

Khan’s FTC also faced its share of setbacks, with perhaps her most stinging defeat coming in the Microsoft-Activision Blizzard merger, which was completed in October 2023. The agency’s other major initiative, a rule ending noncompetes—which it estimated covers 18% of U.S. workers—was blocked by a federal court before it was set to go into effect last year.

Making Antitrust Accessible to the Masses

Khan remains outspoken on regulatory issues. She recently criticized a federal appeals court’s decision to block the click-to-cancel rule, which she said the Trump FTC “slow-walked” and co-authored a Stanford Law Review article on the harmful impacts of industry self-regulation as it relates to consumer privacy. She also joined New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and former gubernatorial primary challenger to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Zephyr Teachout, for a discussion about fighting against corporate greed.

If there’s one takeaway about Khan’s time at the FTC, it’s that she made herself—and her policies—accessible to the masses. Regulation, under Khan, was cool—maybe for the first time ever.

Just check out how she broke it down to NPR in November 2023: “Monopoly power and consolidation can make the difference between whether you have to drive five miles to go to the hospital or whether you’re driving 50 miles to go to the hospital. It can be the difference between whether you’re paying $4 for eggs or $10 for eggs. It can make the difference between whether you can quit your job and have opportunities with a rival firm or whether you’re, in fact, just stuck working for a company, even if they’re docking your wages or worsening your working conditions. And so there are just very real material consequences of how we do antitrust.”

All this to say, Lina Khan for president?

Image Sources

• Gilett, E., Flickr, 4 April 2022. CC0 1.0 Universal. Changes were made.