President Joe Biden announced today that he plans to appoint Columbia Law School professor Lina Khan to serve as a commissioner at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Khan is considered a leading scholar in the antitrust movement.
In 2017, she published a 24,000-word article in The Yale Law Journal entitled “Amazon’s antitrust paradox“It went viral. In it, she argues that current U.S. policy and laws are not enough to hold companies like Amazon accountable. More recently, Khan helped the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee complete its investigation on Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, the main conclusions that the panel’s Democrats concluded was that Congress should consider separating the biggest tech players.
Biden’s decision to nominate Khan follows his recent appointment of Tim Wu to the White House National Economic Council. Wu is best known for coining the term net neutrality. Like Khan, he is also a prominent voice on the subject of antitrust law. Together, the appointments suggest that the Biden government plans to aggressively regulate Big Tech companies.