Lina Khan
Based on Wikipedia: Lina Khan
In 2017, a twenty-eight-year-old law student published an article that would reshape how America thinks about corporate power. The piece was called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," and by the time Lina Khan graduated from Yale Law School, it had become, as The New York Times put it, "a runaway best-seller in the world of legal treatises"—a phrase that sounds like an oxymoron until you understand what she was arguing.
For four decades, American antitrust law had operated on a simple principle: if prices stay low, there's no problem. This framework came from a 1978 book by Robert Bork called "The Antitrust Paradox," which argued that the only thing regulators should care about is consumer welfare, measured primarily by price. Under this view, a company could grow enormous, swallow competitors, and dominate entire industries—as long as consumers were getting cheap goods.
Khan looked at Amazon and saw the flaw in this logic.
The Paradox of Platform Power
Here's the problem Khan identified: Amazon isn't just a store. It's a platform. It operates the marketplace where millions of third-party sellers do business, and it also competes against those very sellers with its own products. Imagine if the owner of a shopping mall also ran stores inside that mall, could see exactly what every other store was selling and for how much, and could place their own stores in the best locations while burying competitors in the basement.
That's roughly what happens on Amazon. The company can observe which products are selling well, launch competing versions, and use its control of search results and the "Buy Box"—that crucial button that determines which seller gets the sale—to favor its own offerings.
Under the traditional consumer welfare standard, none of this mattered as long as prices stayed low. But Khan argued this was exactly the paradox: Amazon could use low prices as a weapon, operating at losses for years to eliminate competition. Once competitors were gone, the company would have unprecedented power over both consumers and the businesses that depended on its platform.
The response from the legal establishment was fierce. One former Federal Trade Commission (FTC) commissioner dismissed her work as "hipster antitrust." Another scholar called her claims "technically undisciplined, untestable, and even incoherent." But something else happened too: Makan Delrahim, the head of antitrust enforcement under Donald Trump, praised her for "fresh thinking on how our legal tools apply to new digital platforms."
The article received over 146,000 hits—extraordinary for an academic law journal piece. More importantly, it gave language and intellectual framework to a growing sense that something had gone wrong with American capitalism.
From London to Washington
Khan's path to becoming the face of a new antitrust movement began in London, where she was born in 1989 to Pakistani immigrant parents. Her father worked as a management consultant; her mother worked for Thomson Reuters, the news and information company. The family lived in Golders Green, a leafy neighborhood in north London known for its Jewish community and proximity to Hampstead Heath.
When Khan was eleven, her family moved to the United States, settling in Mamaroneck, a small town in Westchester County, New York, about twenty-five miles north of Manhattan. She attended public school there and got involved with the student newspaper—an early sign of her interest in public discourse and investigation.
At Williams College in Massachusetts, she studied political science and spent a year at Oxford through an exchange program. She edited the student newspaper and wrote her senior thesis on Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher famous for coining the phrase "the banality of evil" while covering the trial of Nazi official Adolf Eichmann. Arendt's work centered on how ordinary people become complicit in systems of oppression—a theme that would echo in Khan's later critique of how American law had enabled corporate concentration.
After graduating in 2010, Khan joined the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington. There she worked for Barry Lynn at the Open Markets Program, researching market consolidation. Lynn specifically wanted someone without an economics background—a telling detail. The field of antitrust had become so captured by a particular economic framework that he believed fresh eyes might see things the specialists had missed.
The Path Not Taken
After four years of anti-monopoly research, Khan faced a choice. The Wall Street Journal offered her a reporting position covering commodities. Yale Law School accepted her application. She describes it as "a real 'choose the path' moment."
She chose Yale.
This decision matters because it shows Khan understood that changing how America thinks about corporate power would require working within the legal system, not just writing about it from outside. Journalism could expose problems; law could solve them.
At Yale, she served as a submissions editor for the Yale Journal on Regulation. Her third-year paper, "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," was published in the Yale Law Journal in 2017. It won the Antitrust Writing Award for Best Academic Unilateral Conduct Article, the Israel H. Peres Prize from Yale Law School, and the Michael Egger Prize from the Yale Law Journal.
More importantly, it made her famous—or at least as famous as a legal scholar can become.
Into the Arena
After law school, Khan returned to work with Barry Lynn, now at the Open Markets Institute (OMI). The institute had split from New America under dramatic circumstances: Khan and her colleagues had criticized Google's market power, and Google, which was a major funder of New America, pressured the organization. Lynn's team was essentially pushed out and formed their own independent organization.
This episode illustrated exactly what Khan had been writing about. When platforms become powerful enough, they can shape the discourse about their own power. Academic institutions, think tanks, and media organizations all depend on funding—and the major tech companies had become major funders of the institutions that might otherwise scrutinize them.
At OMI, Khan met with Senator Elizabeth Warren to discuss anti-monopoly policy. She published another influential paper, "The Separation of Platforms and Commerce," in the Columbia Law Review. The title echoed historic American precedents: the separation of banking and commerce, the separation of railroads from the industries they served. Khan was arguing that platforms like Amazon should be prohibited from competing against the businesses that depend on them—a structural solution rather than trying to police individual acts of abuse.
In 2018, she worked as a legal fellow at the Federal Trade Commission under Commissioner Rohit Chopra, getting her first direct experience with the agency she would later lead. The following year, she joined the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, where she led a congressional investigation into digital markets that produced a 450-page report documenting anti-competitive practices at Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google.
The Youngest Chair
On March 22, 2021, President Joe Biden nominated Khan to the Federal Trade Commission. The Senate confirmed her on June 15 with a vote of 69 to 28—significant bipartisan support that reflected a growing consensus, at least in Congress, that Big Tech had become too powerful.
Biden immediately appointed her chair of the FTC. At thirty-two, she became the youngest person ever to hold the position.
The reaction from the tech industry was immediate. Both Amazon and Meta—the company formerly known as Facebook—filed petitions demanding Khan recuse herself from any investigations of their companies. They argued that her previous criticism made her incapable of impartiality. It was an audacious move: the companies were essentially saying that having publicly analyzed their business practices disqualified her from regulating them.
Legal scholars noted that the standard for recusal is very high and unlikely to be met simply because someone has expressed views. Senator Warren and other Khan supporters characterized the recusal demands as intimidation—an attempt to scare the new chair into softening her approach. Khan refused to recuse herself.
The ethics saga took an interesting turn when it emerged that the FTC's own ethics official, who had recommended Khan recuse from the Meta case, owned Meta stock at the time—a potential conflict of interest on the ethics official's part. Khan and the full commission released a statement supporting the official anyway, an unusual act of institutional solidarity.
The New Brandeis Movement
Khan has described herself as part of the "New Brandeis" movement, named after Louis Brandeis, who served on the Supreme Court from 1916 to 1939. Brandeis believed that concentrated economic power was dangerous regardless of whether prices stayed low—that democracy itself was threatened when a handful of corporations controlled major industries.
This philosophy represented a direct challenge to forty years of antitrust orthodoxy. The Robert Bork approach—focused exclusively on consumer welfare and prices—had made antitrust enforcement increasingly rare. Mergers sailed through. Industries consolidated. And while consumers might have gotten cheap goods, workers saw wages stagnate, small businesses found fewer buyers for their products, and towns watched as local enterprises were absorbed into national chains.
The New Brandeis thinkers argued that antitrust law was never meant to be solely about prices. Congress passed the original antitrust laws—the Sherman Act of 1890 and the Clayton Act of 1914—out of concern about the political power of trusts, not just their economic effects. Standard Oil and the railroad barons weren't just raising prices; they were corrupting democracy.
Under Khan, the FTC pursued this broader vision. The commission voted unanimously in 2021 to enforce the right to repair—the principle that you should be able to fix the things you own. This targeted practices where manufacturers design products to require proprietary tools or parts, forcing consumers to pay for authorized repairs.
The FTC also pursued lawsuits to lower drug prices, including for insulin and inhalers. And in 2024, the commission adopted the "click to cancel" rule, requiring that companies make it as easy to end a subscription as it was to start one. Anyone who has tried to cancel a gym membership or streaming service knows this problem: signing up takes thirty seconds online, while canceling requires a phone call during business hours to a representative trained to talk you out of it.
The Non-Compete Battle
In April 2024, the FTC issued what Khan called a landmark regulation: a near-total ban on non-compete agreements. These are contracts that prohibit employees from working for competitors after leaving a job. Historically used for senior executives with access to trade secrets, non-competes had spread throughout the economy. Fast-food workers, hair stylists, and warehouse employees were increasingly required to sign agreements that prevented them from taking similar jobs elsewhere.
The FTC estimated that banning non-competes would increase wages by nearly $300 billion per year and create 8,500 new businesses annually. The commission argued these agreements suppressed wages, reduced innovation, and trapped workers in jobs they couldn't leave.
But in August 2024, a federal court struck down the rule. The judge ruled that the FTC had exceeded its authority—that Congress had never given the commission power to issue such a broad regulation. The decision was a reminder that even a bold regulatory agenda operates within legal constraints, and that the current Supreme Court has been increasingly skeptical of agency power.
A Mixed Record in Court
Khan's tenure at the FTC produced a mixed record in merger challenges. During her first two years, the agency lost several high-profile cases. Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard—the video game publisher behind Call of Duty and World of Warcraft—went through despite FTC opposition. Meta's acquisition of Within, a virtual reality fitness company, also survived FTC challenge.
Critics argued these losses showed Khan was bringing weak cases driven by ideology rather than sound legal strategy. The Wall Street Journal published over 124 critical pieces during her tenure. House Republicans accused her of filing lawsuits she expected to lose in order to create pressure for Congress to expand antitrust authority.
But the picture shifted later in her tenure. In December 2023, the FTC won a major victory, blocking Illumina's acquisition of Grail after a three-year legal battle. Illumina makes DNA sequencing machines; Grail uses those machines to develop cancer detection tests. The FTC argued the merger would allow Illumina to raise prices and stifle competition in the emerging cancer testing market.
In 2024, the FTC won two more significant cases. It blocked Tapestry's attempted acquisition of Capri, a merger that would have combined Coach and Kate Spade with Michael Kors and Versace. And it blocked Kroger's attempted acquisition of Albertsons, which would have combined two of the largest grocery chains in America.
Khan and her supporters pointed to another form of success: deals that never went to court at all. Lockheed Martin abandoned its planned acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne after FTC scrutiny. Sanofi dropped its attempt to acquire Maze Therapeutics. The mere possibility of an FTC challenge, Khan argued, created deterrence that didn't show up in courtroom win-loss records.
Turbulence at the Agency
Khan's tenure was marked by internal controversy as well as external battles. According to surveys conducted by the Office of Personnel Management, employee satisfaction at the FTC dropped sharply after her arrival. In 2020, before Khan's appointment, 94.3 percent of FTC staff had favorable views of senior leadership. By 2022, that number had fallen to 46.6 percent.
This was remarkable because the FTC had traditionally ranked at the very top of federal agencies for employee satisfaction, regardless of which party controlled the White House. Under Khan, it went from first in favorable views of leadership to first in unfavorable views.
FTC officials attributed the decline to several factors: a perceived lack of clear strategy, insufficient knowledge of agency operations, and disrespect for career staff. One of Khan's first acts—banning public speaking by FTC employees—was widely unpopular and eventually retracted with an apology in 2022.
In February 2023, Republican FTC Commissioner Christine Wilson announced she would resign, citing opposition to Khan's leadership. It was an unusual public rebuke.
Khan acknowledged the morale problems in congressional testimony in July 2023 and said improving staff satisfaction was a priority. The 2023 surveys showed improvement, with the agency reclaiming about half of its losses since 2021. But the episode illustrated that transforming an agency requires more than bold vision—it requires bringing career staff along.
Strange Bedfellows
One of the most surprising aspects of Khan's tenure was the bipartisan nature of her support. At a July 2023 House hearing, several Republicans praised her work even as others attacked it.
Ken Buck, a Colorado Republican not known for agreeing with progressive causes, highlighted a telling contrast: Congress permitted its own members to trade stocks based on insider knowledge, yet some wanted to limit Khan because she "wrote a law review article." Matt Gaetz, the Florida Republican, praised Khan's investigation of Ring—the Amazon-owned doorbell camera company—and asked her to continue pursuing Kochava, a data broker accused of selling location data in ways that violated privacy.
JD Vance, then a senator from Ohio and later vice president, cited Khan's campaigns against large technology companies as a success for American antitrust efforts. This reflected a broader shift in Republican politics. The old conservative orthodoxy, which treated any regulation as an attack on free enterprise, was giving way among some Republicans to a populist skepticism of Big Tech—companies they increasingly saw as culturally hostile to conservative values.
Khan's former colleague Matt Stoller went further, calling her "the best chair the FTC has ever had." Agree or disagree, there was no denying she had revitalized an agency that had been largely quiescent for decades and made antitrust policy interesting to the general public for the first time since the breakup of AT&T in 1984.
The End of the Term
Despite the bipartisan support, Khan was not retained when Donald Trump began his second presidential term in 2025. Andrew N. Ferguson replaced her as FTC chair. The decision surprised some observers who had noted positive comments about Khan from Trump allies like Vance and Steve Bannon.
But Khan's story was not over. Following the 2025 New York City mayoral election, Zohran Mamdani—a Democratic Socialist member of the state legislature who won a surprise victory—named Khan as co-chair of his mayoral transition team. It was an indication that her influence extended beyond federal antitrust policy into the broader progressive movement.
The Larger Significance
Whether you agree with Khan's approach or not, her career illuminates something important about how ideas travel from academic journals to policy reality.
In 2016, she was an unknown law student. By 2021, she was running a federal agency, implementing ideas she had developed as a student. This happened because she identified a real problem—the inadequacy of existing frameworks for dealing with platform monopolies—and articulated it in a way that resonated across political lines.
Her tenure also reveals the limits of regulatory action. Courts can strike down rules. Congress can refuse to expand authority. Staff can resist. The companies being regulated can fight back with armies of lawyers and lobbyists. Even a chair with strong convictions operates within constraints.
The question Khan forced Americans to confront was not really about Amazon or Facebook or any particular company. It was about what kind of economy we want. Should antitrust law care only about prices, as Robert Bork argued in 1978? Or should it care about power—about whether a handful of companies can dominate the platforms on which our economy runs, the channels through which information flows, and the marketplaces where businesses live and die?
For four decades, American law gave one answer. Lina Khan, at least, made sure we had to ask the question again.