Lina and her pitched battle with the Big Tech: An assured slot for her in US economic history whatever the outcome

Lina Khan is the youngest chair to occupy the seat at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and since she entered into FTC, the bosses of Big Tech firms – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google/Alphabet – have lost peaceful sleep

Logistics Monitor/By Ramesh Kumar

Lina Khan. A million words have been written since her induction as the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). She is the youngest chair to occupy the seat at FTC. Her credentials are impeccable.

Who is she? Here is what the White House put out on March 22, 2021, when U.S. President Joe Biden nominated her for FTC:

“Lina Khan is an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, and the anti-monopoly tradition. Her antitrust scholarship has received several awards and has been published by the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review. Khan previously served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she helped lead the Subcommittee’s investigation into digital markets. Khan was also a legal advisor in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra at the Federal Trade Commission and legal director at the Open Markets Institute. She is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School.”

Soon after the U.S. Senate confirmed her induction on June 15, she tweeted:

“I’m so grateful to the Senate for my confirmation. Congress created the FTC to safeguard fair competition and protect consumers, workers, and honest businesses from unfair & deceptive practices. I look forward to upholding this mission with vigor and serving the American public.”

Her 2017 published paper, Amazon’s AntiTrust Paradox, brought her into the limelight. She argued that the existing antitrust enforcement was inadequate to deal with today’s tech giants. A radical thought.

Perfect fit

However, the Biden admin found her the perfect fit to bolster their economic agenda of taming the tech giants’ unchecked growth, which is not in the interest of consumers and workers. Thus, she entered FTC.

Believe it or not, Lina Khan is more popular than Imran Khan, the cricketer-turned-Prime Minister of Pakistan. By the way, Lina has Pakistani roots: her parents were Pakistanis, settled in Britain where she was born, and then migrated to the United States when she was 10. Of course, she is a U.S. citizen and married to cardiologist Shahi Ali.

Since she entered into FTC, the bosses of Big Tech firms – Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google/Alphabet – have lost peaceful sleep. Unlike Donald Trump, perceived to be Big Tech-friendly, tech-critic Lina’s anointment in the new avatar signals the Biden administration’s stance to tame them.

Break, if necessary but stop them in their tracks. Simply put, the general perception in the White House is that under the guise of consumer protection, these firms have finished already or are in the process of driving the nail into the coffin of smaller players whom they were originally supposed to help them grow but changed the script to line their pockets and achieve massive market domination.

Lina, observers say, may not succeed in taming the Big Tech, given their deep pockets and their lobbying power cutting across party lines on the American political spectrum via Congress and the Senate. Assuming FTC under Lina succeeds in filing new cases against them, it is unfathomable at this juncture how the American courts may interpret the prevailing statute concerning consumer protection and other related issues. The chances of the legal battle dragging for years are not to be forgotten, thus curtailing Lina’s enthusiastic championing of Biden agenda.

Taming the Big Tech

Such possible hurdles do not take away the youngest FTC Chair’s popularity and adulation. The New Yorker ran a 10-page long profile of Lina Khan in early December. “The real work of Khan’s antitrust fight will be about changing minds over time – first those of consumers, and then those of judges and legislators who must reshape the legal framework to reflect a new world view.”

Around the same time, Bloomberg wrote, “If FTC wins (the case against Facebook and paves the way for splitting off Instagram and WhatsApp), it would be historic. The government has not broken up a monopoly since AT&Ts “Ma Bell” telephone system in the early 1980s.”

The best compliment comes from Elizabeth Warren, a senior U.S. Senator, when she writes in the Financial Times of London in the year-ender piece, “Thankfully, Lina has the necessary courage and brilliance to take this fight to the worst dominant firms plaguing our society like Facebook and Amazon and they deserve every bit of her scrutiny.”

Lina has an assured slot in the American economic history when it is written, irrespective of the outcome of the current pitched battle with the Big Tech.

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The author is a business journalist specializing in logistics and supply chain. He has traveled 200,000 km on the Indian highways, met over 100,000 long-haul truck drivers across India since January 2010. He has authored three books: 10,000KM on Indian Highways, Naked Banana! and An Affair With Indian Highways. He is a Life Member of the Chartered Institute of Logistics & Transportation (CILT-India Chapter). He can be reached at konsultramesh@gmail.com. In this column, ‘Logistics Monitor’, he presents a global perspective on logistics and supply chain. The views are the author’s own and The News Porter bears no responsibility for the same.