Lina Khan, Big Tech skeptic, named FTC chair mere hours after confirmation

President Joe Biden named Lina Khan chair of the Federal Trade Commission just hours after her confirmation in the Senate as one of the agency's five commissioners. 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. “A lot of the day to day at the FTC has little to do with tech, and a lot of the agenda is just not up to the chairman. It comes inbound from consumer complaints, merger proposals, etc. It will be interesting to see how she manages that—and with a divided Congress. That just has to be challenging.”

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.

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