Senate confirms Lina Khan to Federal Trade Commission in a 69-28 vote
Source: Washington Post
The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, elevating one of the tech industrys most prominent antitrust critics to the governments top Silicon Valley watchdog. The vote was 69-28 in a Senate split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans, signaling the growing bipartisan interest in reining in large tech companies power, just days after House lawmakers from both parties unveiled a series of bills that could force Silicon Valley companies to change their business practices and in the most severe cases, break the companies up.
Khan, who is aligned with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, is well-known for her 2017 paper, Amazons Antitrust Paradox, which argued that decades-old antitrust laws arent equipped to deal with the e-commerce giant and the unique ways it exerts its dominance. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Khan previously worked as a counsel for the House Judiciarys antitrust panel, where she helped lead an investigation into the tech giants. That probes findings of monopoly-style tactics and anti-competitive behavior at Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon gave rise to the recent bills introduced by House lawmakers.
Khan, 32, will be one of the youngest commissioners in the FTCs history after a meteoric rise since writing the Amazon paper as a law school student. She is an associate professor at Columbia Law School, and previously worked as a legal adviser to FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra (D). During her confirmation hearing, she signaled she would take a tough line on regulating tech giants.
She said that in the past few years, new evidence has come to light showing there were missed opportunities for enforcement actions against tech companies under the Obama administration. She also said new findings show the FTC must be much more vigilant when it comes to large acquisitions in digital markets. Khan also said she was particularly concerned about the ways in which large companies use their dominance in one market to give them an upper hand in others, an issue under intense scrutiny by Congress.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/15/khan-ftc-confirmation-vote/