Lina Khan is set to become one of the most powerful critics of big tech in the US
Credit: New York Times / Redux / eyevine
The vibrant streets of Golders Green, where Lina Khan grew up, are a world away from the gilded corridors that she finds herself in today.
The London-born legal prodigy is on a fast-track to becoming one of US President Joe Biden’s most trusted appointees- and a thorn in the side of some of the world’s most powerful companies.
On Monday, Biden announced his intention to nominate 32-year-old Khan to the five-member Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
The announcement raised eyebrows given Khan’s aggressive stance against big tech giants and the power they hold, further signalling Biden crackdown on technology giants.
For Khan, however, it’s the culmination of years of hard work to get to the top of a male-dominated industry. Not only is she succeeding, but she could be the woman to finally bring US monopolies to heel.
Born in London to Pakistani parents who worked as a management consultant and an information services executive, Khan developed a reputation for being a softly spoken but formidable student, with a classmate recalling regular sessions at the library that only ended when it closed at 2am.
Her intelligence was evident at an early age. Khan’s parents moved to New York to take new jobs in 2000, when she was 11. The move propelled her towards a career as a legal scholar once she had decided to drop an initial plan of becoming a journalist at The Wall Street Journal.
Legal scholar Lina Khan
Credit: An Rong Xu for the Washington Post
Her sense of fairness stems in part from her family’s experience in the US. "Coming of age after 9/11, as a Muslim, our community was just under a lot of scepticism and scrutiny," she has said. Her family members "would always get pulled over at the airport" and treated like "potential terrorists," she said.
After graduating in 2010 from Williams College, where Khan studied political theory and wrote her thesis on the German-born political theorist Hannah Arendt as well as editing the student newspaper, she began studying at Yale Law School.
But it was a 2016 paper that Khan wrote as a law student that really got her noticed. The 24,000-word article she published in the Yale Law Journal sharply criticised the failure of US antitrust policy to curtail Amazon’s rise unexpectedly went viral.
“It is as if [Amazon chief executive Jeff] Bezos charted the company’s growth by first drawing a map of antitrust laws, and then devising routes to smoothly bypass them,” Khan wrote in the article. “With its missionary zeal for consumers, Amazon has marched toward monopoly by singing the tune of contemporary antitrust.”
Khan’s opposition to anti-competitive practices runs deep. “One of my hobbies has now become trying to find the most obscure industry where I can find consolidation,” she said in a 2017 podcast. She laughed as she explained issues with the earthquake insurance industry.
She has largely stopped using Amazon, although her 2018 wedding to Shah Ali, a cardiologist who also comes from a Pakistani family, brought a fan of the e-commerce giant into her life. The pair, who met via mutual friends spent their honeymoon in Hawaii, a prime spot for Khan to engage in her favourite hobby of photography, a passion that she showcases in a photo gallery on her personal website.
Still Khan admits she finds it hard to switch off from work. Her husband has joked that he finds out about her activities through Twitter, where she has for years posted about the progress of antitrust policies — often via lengthy threads that expand at length about her views.
Khan’s 2016 analysis about Amazon helped to start a movement that has been dubbed “hipster antitrust” — a term that she has since jokingly used herself.
In the article, she advocated for the undoing of Reagan-era reforms to antitrust policy, eliminating low costs as the most important outcome and returning to a structural view that considers the harms of vertical integration and predatory pricing.
For consumers who had grown uneasy about Amazon’s dominance, she offered a potential solution.
Her work has won her fans in the interventionist wing of the Democratic Party. Her political donations show her support for breakthrough leftwing politicians: Khan has donated $50 (£36) to Beto O’Rourke,, and $50 for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But not everyone shared her views. Khan worked for several years at the New America think tank but left the organisation in 2017 following a debate over its response to EU regulation of technology giants.
Khan and 10 other employees left New America after her Open Markets team published a statement welcoming a $2.7bn EU fine against Google. Former Google chief executive Eric Schmidt, who along with Google had spent millions of dollars funding New America, objected to the statement.
The split caused Khan to have to work without pay for a month as Open Markets established itself as an independent think tank.
“I’m sad for what New America’s decision to expel Open Markets means for New America,” Khan wrote at the time. “Monopolies wield economic and political power. Google’s power threatens not just our markets but free expression and information.”
If her nomination is confirmed, Khan will gain an influential position that will place her at the forefront of US opposition to technology giants.
The addition of Khan could bring about a “change of philosophy” inside the FTC, says Sam Bowman, the director of competition policy at the International Center for Law and Economics. Bowman says her appointment could lead the FTC to challenge more cases that do not stick to the narrow "consumer welfare" standard of US tradition.
The FTC is currently waging a legal battle against Facebook in an attempt to undo its purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp. Adding Khan to the FTC’s commission could see the agency take an even closer link at the activities of technology giants.
Joining the FTC commission will see Khan became one of Washington DC’s most influential figures, and will likely end her time living between the technology hotbed of New York and Dallas, where her husband carried out a cardiology fellowship.
Khan’s nomination won’t shift the balance of power inside the FTC commission, however. She replaces Rohit Chopra, whose opposition to big tech monopolies is well-documented.
If confirmed, Khan will become the youngest-ever FTC commissioner. But the confirmation is not yet a done deal. Mike Lee, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on antitrust, opposes her nomination. “Being less than four years out of law school, she lacks the experience necessary for such an important role,” he has said.
Any hopes of Khan becoming an antitrust crusader breaking up tech giants in a similar vein to the EU’s Margrethe Vestager are likely to be dashed, however.
“The FTC is not like a European competition regulator where the FTC makes decisions about what’s allowed,” Bowman says. “The FTC’s role is to be a litigant and to make decisions about when it will challenge conduct.”
Nervous technology lobbyists are paying close attention to Khan’s views, however. They’re unlikely to find much to be happy about from her Twitter account.
One of her first posts from 2017 begins with the lobbyist-worrying phrase: “we need a new anti-monopoly movement.” Once she joins the FTC commission, Khan could find the perfect vehicle to step up her work.
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