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Lina Khan, Big Tech skeptic, named FTC chair mere hours after confirmation - Ars Technica
Jun 16, 2021 1 min, 12 secs
It’s an unusual move—newly nominated commissioners are seldom elevated to chair immediately—and it likely signals that the Biden administration will be taking a hawkish approach to antitrust enforcement, particularly when it comes to Big Tech platform companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.

Though Khan is certain to take a harsher view on platforms, the FTC is unlikely to begin dismantling Big Tech tomorrow.

“Lina Khan has pushed the academic conversation on tech, and now she has to push the agenda at the FTC,” Shane Greenstein, a professor at Harvard Business School, told Ars.

As a law student four years ago, Khan published a highly influential paper that recast the debate over anticompetitive behavior, particularly among Big Tech firms.

In the paper, titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” Khan argued that using prices as the primary gauge of anticompetitive behavior was an insufficient measure of market power among certain firms, particularly Big Tech companies and their platforms.

“Second, because online platforms serve as critical intermediaries, integrating across business lines positions these platforms to control the essential infrastructure on which their rivals depend.” Those two qualities of today’s platforms have also allowed Big Tech companies to collect data on rivals, putting the rivals in uncompetitive positions.

As chair, Khan will have control of the agency’s agenda and staff.

Even if those bills don’t pass, they may still push antitrust enforcement in the direction the legislators are moving.

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