[ad_1]
Just before Halloween in 2013, Lina Khan In her local Safeway supermarket, wandering among the dazzling array of candies, she found a disturbing news.
About 40 brands of candies on the shelves only provide consumers with a mirage choice; they are actually owned by only two or three confectioners.Khan, the junior policy analyst at the time, was so frustrated that she Wrote about it In Time Magazine. “If we want a healthier and more diverse market — and more variety of our Halloween barrels — we can start by restoring some of our antitrust laws.”
Khan’s critique of corporate power goes far beyond Big Candy. She discussed the problems of concentration and monopoly in industries ranging from airlines to poultry and metals, and came to similar conclusions.And she began to train her attention to excessive market influence Big technology, Eventually became one of its most outspoken and famous critics.
So when the 32-year-old Khan this week Tap US President Joe Biden is chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, the highest competition regulator, which has caused shocks in Washington, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley. The general expectation is that she will now seek to usher in a new era of antitrust enforcement in the United States.
Robert Kaminski, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington policy research organization, said: “Now she is in power, it’s scary.” “She is holding the hammer, all she sees is nails,” he added Tao.
Khan was born and raised in London, with parents from Pakistan; her family moved to the United States when she was 11 years old. The first signs of her interest in unfair corporate behavior appeared early.
She is located in a Starbucks coffee shop across the street from high school in Mamaroneck, a suburb of northeastern New York City, preventing teenagers from sitting down because they are too noisy. A commotion ensued, and Khan recorded the incident in her school newspaper, which was later reported by the New York Times.
Khan will continue to attend Williams College, where she studies political theory. After graduating, she came to Washington to work for the New America Foundation (a center-left think tank), which allowed her to study entrepreneurship and competition.
“We used to have a lot of independent companies, a lot of local companies, a wide variety,” she said Say In 2012, “we now actually see only a few companies that control almost every industry.”
Khan eventually entered Yale Law School and published an article in the Yale Law Journal in January 2017 that made her famous in one fell swoop: “Amazon’s antitrust paradox“.
This work became popular. Robert Hockett, a professor of corporate law at Cornell University, said: “You can almost think of it as the first article in the revival of antitrust revisionism.”
The core of Khan’s philosophy is that companies including Amazon have benefited from loose antitrust scrutiny for decades, during which low consumer prices have become the main factor in formulating competition policies. She envisioned a different antitrust system, similar to the system that existed in the early 20th century, when the US authorities did not hesitate to break the monopoly.
Amazon declined to comment on her appointment.
“What she did was actually restore antitrust and market policies to what they were in the 1920s to the 1960s, or even the 1970s,” said David Singh Grewal, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Say.
People who know Khan, who is married to a cardiologist, describe her as humble and even reserved.
“She does live a private life in private,” Grewal said. “It’s easy to see her as a spokesperson for the millennial generation, sometimes referred to as “fashionable” and antitrust, but she is very different from the personality-driven social media phenomenon that surrounds her.”
After obtaining a law degree, Khan became a professor at Columbia University and worked at the Open Market Institute, an antitrust think tank in Washington. On Capitol Hill, she helped draft the House of Representatives’ Judicial Antitrust Subcommittee’s investigation of large technology companies. Many Republicans remain cautious. “Her views on antitrust enforcement are also very different from prudent legal methods,” Utah Senator Mike Lee said in March.
But Khan’s status in the Democratic circle has soared, surpassing traditional large-scale technology critics such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, including more mainstream politicians such as Biden. Even so, although she is expected to serve as a commissioner in the FTC, few people predict that she will be selected to actually lead the agency.
“She really managed to soar so quickly. I will attribute it to her vision,” said Kate Judge, a professor at Columbia Law School.
Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Freedom Project, referred to Khan as the “Simon Byers” of the antitrust industry, referring to the record-breaking American Olympic gymnast. “It proves that the United States has this kind of large-scale concentration crisis… Played a role in making people in the more traditional Democratic circles realize that it is necessary to turn pages completely… and she is clearly the one who helped lead this. “
[ad_2]
Source link
