President Joe Biden has announced that he wants to nominate Lina Khan, a jurist and leading voice in the growing technological antitrust movement, to serve as a commissioner to the Federal Trade Commission.
The choice indicates that the government in Biden is preparing to tackle some of the most powerful and influential companies in the technology industry. In 2017, Khan wrote an article for the Yale Law Journal titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox”, which exploded in popularity in progressive economic policy circles. Khan also served as an Assistant to the House Antitrust Subcommittee on Antitrust during his many years of investigation into competitive behavior in the technology industry.
Khan’s nomination follows the appointment of Tim Wu, a professor of Columbia law, to work on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council. Wu coined the term ‘net neutrality’ and was a prominent voice on antitrust regulation against Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google.
Biden’s choice of Khan to serve on the FTC comes as regulators, lawmakers and the courts come under tremendous pressure to tackle Big Tech. The House Law began the second stages of its antitrust investigation last month, and it plans to introduce competition law to help this spring.
In February, the current acting chair of the FTC, Rebecca Slaughter, made remarks suggesting that the agency would take an aggressive approach to technology. Slaughter outlined her enforcement priorities, including competition in markets and algorithmic discrimination.
‘[M]”Any of the biggest players in digital markets are just as powerful as because of the extent of their access to and control over consumer data,” Slaughter said at the time.