Our government is now enforcing the antitrust laws. For decades, there was a spirit haunting our antirust enforcement offices -- a spirit of desuetude. Thanks to President Joe Biden and FTC Chair Lina Khan for enforcing our antitrust laws as written, for the reasons they were written, since the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. From The New York Times:
Billionaire Donors Have It Out for This Legal Prodigy, but President Harris Will Need Her
Opinion Columnist, reporting from Chicago
Until about a week ago, a big question in Democratic politics was whether a potential President Kamala Harris would keep Lina Khan — the pathbreaking young lawyer loved by progressives and loathed by some of Harris’s billionaire donors — as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that enforces antimonopoly law.
Some wealthy Harris backers have called for Khan’s replacement, including the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who donated $10 million to a Democratic super PAC this year. On the financial news network CNBC, Barry Diller, chair of IAC and Expedia Group, said he’d lobby Harris to get rid of Khan, whom he called a “dope.” He later apologized for the insult, but not the promise to use his influence against her.
Because Harris’s economic views seemed fuzzy and her ties to Silicon Valley are strong, some on the left worried she might give in to the pressure. Those fears were heightened when Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a close ally of the vice president, was asked on CNBC about jettisoning Khan, and suggested that Harris might break from President Biden’s aggressive approach to antitrust. “There are going to be different dynamics that are going to require different philosophies,” said Moore.
But it increasingly looks as if anti-Khan forces might be disappointed. As the broad outlines of Harris’s economic approach have emerged over the last week, it seems at least as populist as Biden’s.
Her plan to combat price gouging features an aggressive role for the F.T.C. At the Democratic convention, especially on the opening night, “corporate greed” was a scourge, and speaker after speaker sought to link “freedom,” the central theme of Harris’s campaign, to programs that protect the middle class from the depredations of concentrated wealth. Even the ordinarily pro-business secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, blasted “monopolies that crush workers and small businesses and start-ups.” And as Lauren Feiner pointed out in The Verge, the Democratic platform mentions “competition” 18 times, twice as often as it did four years ago, and emphasized policies that Khan has been closely involved with. Suddenly, Khan seems more likely to be a linchpin of a potential Harris presidency than a casualty of it.
To grasp why she matters so much, you have to understand how Khan, a 35-year-old legal wunderkind, became both so revered and so abhorred. Khan is a heroine to many on the left; Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me that Khan is her caucus’s favorite guest speaker. But she’s also respected by many populist conservatives, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, who called her “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” What brings Khan’s fans together is suspicion of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech, even if the reason for their suspicion differs.
“She’s been obviously a strong, committed person for consumers in ways that we’ve rarely seen,” Senator Bob Casey, Democrat of Pennsylvania, told me at the Democratic National Convention. “Too often, I think consumers were often shoved aside by many administrations.”
Khan’s fame dates to her time in law school, when a paper she wrote, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” helped revolutionize her field’s approach to technology behemoths. As F.T.C. chair, she’s focused on the manifold ways that big corporations and big finance abuse individuals. “How people experience power in their day-to-day lives is usually in their economic relationships, right?” she told me last week, when we met in the F.T.C.’s Manhattan offices. “If you’re being coerced and bullied in these economic relationships, that’s going to affect, really fundamentally, whether you do or don’t feel free in our country.”
This sort of bullying is most clear when companies stifle competition to raise prices. One of Khan’s big wins came after her office challenged so-called junk patents — an underhanded method used by pharmaceutical companies to fend off the creation of generics — leading the price of some inhalers to fall to $35 from hundreds of dollars. But she’s also working to fight corporate coercion in other ways. Under Khan, the F.T.C. moved to ban the use of noncompete agreements for most employees, challenging a practice that prevents workers from taking jobs at rival companies. (A judge appointed by President Donald Trump enjoined enforcement of the ban this week.) She’s brought lawsuits against data brokers trafficking in geolocation data, which red-state prosecutors could use to track women going to abortion clinics.
Before she went to law school, Khan worked as a business journalist; she was introduced to antitrust while investigating monopoly practices in the poultry industry. Today, she brings reportorial skills to her work at the F.T.C. “One thing that’s been a big focus of my time at the agency is just wanting to make sure — and this goes back to my time as a journalist as well — that we’re actually understanding the reality of how markets are working, and not just relying on models and theories and assumptions that are detached from that reality,” she said.
Khan travels around the country holding listening sessions to make sure she’s hearing voices that sometimes get lost in policymaking. She described a meeting she held in Nevada last fall about a proposed merger between the grocery chains Albertsons and Kroger, which the F.T.C. is fighting. “One person actually brought the sale papers from these two stores and said, ‘Look, right now they’re competing on the price of milk, they’re competing on the price of strawberries,’” she recalled. If that competition disappears, the man told her, “I’m going to have to start choosing, do I buy milk or do I buy strawberries?”
The vice president’s pledge to combat price gouging, an effort the F.T.C. would be central to, has elicited caterwauling from some economic commentators, who see in it the specter of price controls. Those fears seem overwrought; as Axios, hardly a left-wing website, points out, “If banning price gouging is communist, then the U.S. went Marxist long ago. Most of us live in states that already have bans in place.”
But as Casey, a sponsor of Senate legislation to counter price gouging, said, “The only part of our government that’s in the business of taking action against price gouging are our state attorneys general, and they have limited budgets.” His bill, which Harris endorsed, would even the playing field a bit by giving the F.T.C. new powers and $1 billion in new funding to exercise them.
Of course, even though Khan has a few Republican fans, it’s far from clear that such a law could ever pass. But legislative gridlock will make it only more important for a Harris administration to have regulators who can advance her economic agenda as forcefully as they can, even within the constraints of Supreme Court decisions that regularly side with corporations over administrative agencies. American politics is full of choke points protecting the rich and powerful. To get anything done, Harris will need people for whom bureaucratic audacity isn’t a contradiction in terms.
To Khan, as I suspect to Harris, price gouging means more than just corporations raising prices during emergencies. Rather, it’s shorthand for a whole range of exploitative practices that leave consumers feeling taken advantage of. “Oftentimes, the way people are taught about prices is it’s just the result of supply and demand,” she said. “These natural forces. And I think over the last few years in particular, people have started picking up on the fact that actually there are a whole bunch of other factors that can affect pricing.”
That can mean outright collusion, but it can also mean things like junk fees and subscription traps. (Under Khan, the F.T.C. has proposed a rule that companies must make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up for one.) “I view the price-gouging conversation as an opening to talk about that broader set of corporate tactics,” said Khan.
The fight against those tactics could be an important part of a Harris presidency. “Kamala Harris can’t be bought, and she can’t be bossed around,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts onstage at the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night. If she’s right, Khan’s job should be safe.
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Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment.
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