Lina Khan, whose term as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission ended on Wednesday, can remain in the role indefinitely, unless she is replaced.
Credit...Haiyun Jiang for The New York Times

Can Lina Khan Hold On?

Ms. Khan’s term as the chair of the Federal Trade Commission ended Wednesday. In a wide-ranging interview, she discussed her aggressive approach to antitrust and its critics.

by · NY Times

From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, everyone wants to know what’s next for Lina Khan.

On Wednesday, the youngest-ever chair of the Federal Trade Commission reached the end of her three-year term, during which she helped to overhaul the government’s approach to antitrust enforcement and brought a slew of lawsuits against major corporations.

Ms. Khan, 35, can remain in her seat indefinitely, unless she is replaced. There are factions rooting loudly for each of those outcomes.

Under her leadership, the F.T.C. has brought antitrust cases against the tech giants Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, sometimes employing ambitious legal arguments. The agency has tried to ban almost all noncompete clauses and blocked Lockheed Martin and Nvidia from making multibillion-dollar deals.

A powerful bipartisan cohort believes the F.T.C. chair is stretching the scope of antitrust law past its legitimate limits, rashly working to redefine the bounds of key concepts such as monopolization.

Ms. Khan, her staff and her allies essentially contend the opposite: that her leadership is restoring the role of robust, active antitrust enforcement in a legal and economic system that for too long has let those regulatory muscles atrophy to the detriment of consumers and healthier market competition. Consumer watchdogs and some conservatives have cheered on Ms. Khan, defending her populist moves, like the agency’s recent warning to makers of inhalers that their aggressive use of patent loopholes may violate federal law.

Some Democratic donors connected to finance and tech, however, have publicly campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris to remove Ms. Khan as chair of the F.T.C., if she wins the presidential election in November. Her campaign declined to comment on whether she would support Ms. Khan’s staying in the position.

Ms. Khan sat down at a table in her office — fittingly decorated with the board game Anti-Monopoly, a trustbuster take on the classic version — to discuss her transformational tenure and the road ahead.

The interview has been condensed and edited.

What has it felt like to become such a big deal so quickly, and in your mid-30s?

It’s been a whirlwind few years.

I think for some time, issues of antitrust were viewed as somewhat arcane. A decade ago, if I went to a social gathering in Washington, D.C., or even in law school, and I told people I was interested in antitrust, their eyes would kind of glaze over. And I think now, there is much more of a visceral understanding of not just what antitrust is about, but how it connects to major problems and challenges for people’s livelihoods.

The F.T.C., under your leadership, has been much more aggressive. For example, you have attempted to largely ban noncompete clauses. But if you all just find yourselves running up against courts or courts of appeal, where things get struck down, what’s the point?

We’ve actually racked up a lot of wins. We won the government’s first litigated victory in a vertical merger case in over 50 years. On the consumer protection side, we’ve brought a case against a data broker claiming that their collection of everybody’s geolocation data, which is making that very easily available on the market, is injuring people’s privacy. And the court, for the first time ever, said that the F.T.C. Act protects against those types of invasions of privacy.

Beneath the radar, there are so many programmatic wins that we are achieving, not just at the level of a win-loss tally, but in terms of driving forward the law and driving forward the ability of the F.T.C. to actually keep pace with all of the technologies in the 21st century.

There seems to be a visceral distaste for you from many on Wall Street, including mergers-and-acquisitions lawyers and market participants. Do you think that you are misunderstood?

I think you have to first of all figure out which are the voices that you’re focusing on. Look at any of our comment dockets online. We got 25,000 comments from people across the country saying, “Here’s how a noncompete has devastated my life, and here is how the F.T.C. eliminating them will make my life better.”

In Washington, it’s very easy to privilege just some set of voices and not another set of voices. And so we try to open our doors and make sure we are keeping the full country in mind, rather than people who have access to power, or a reporter they can call up and gripe to, or a member of Congress.

One of Wall Street’s arguments against your approach is that acquiring a company that might seem like a competitor is actually part of what drives healthy markets. Because there are small firms that may have the innovation and the human capital, but don’t have the financial capital, that then pair up with a firm that does have the financial capital.

First of all, my role is not one of a policymaker saying thumbs up, thumbs down on a merger. We enforce the law. I get it. There are probably deal-makers out there who wish we didn’t have the antitrust laws. And that’s a thing that you can advocate for with Congress.

I also think it’s interesting that over the last couple of decades, there have been a set of case studies on mergers that were permitted to go through on the basis that there would be efficiencies passed on to consumers, or to other market participants. A lot of times, those efficiencies don’t actually materialize, and when they do, if you don’t have sufficient competition in the market, the companies are not going to have an incentive to pass those efficiencies on to everybody else.

To what extent have anticompetitive practices and consolidation contributed to the inflation that we saw from 2021 through 2023?

If you’re not enforcing antitrust, you’re allowing decades of consolidation that can create inflationary spikes more readily, because your system as a whole is less resilient to that disruption.

Second, a more concentrated market, when you have fewer players, is more easily going to be able to coordinate to hike prices or to keep prices high.

Do you see part of your work as preparing for the next time there’s broad price pressure in the economy?

What would the pandemic have looked like in an alternative scenario where for four decades, we actually were vigorously enforcing the antitrust laws? I think it’s an interesting thought experiment.

I would argue Kamala Harris has been talking your book as part of her campaign strategy. And yet, there’s this interesting chatter of, “Oh, does Lina Khan stay on?” Do you ever worry that your work could get cut short?

I can’t predict what’s going to happen in November, or after that.

You’ve not gotten any whispers, any word that you will not be wanted in a Harris administration?

No, I think to the contrary. We’ve seen the vice president note how she has been a prosecutor taking on illegal practices by corporations that were harming homeowners, that were harming patients, and that’s the work the F.T.C. does as well.

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