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Senate Confirms Lina Khan to Federal Trade Commission in a 69-28 Vote

Accepted submission by upstart at 2021-06-15 16:44:04
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Senate confirms Lina Khan to Federal Trade Commission in a 69-28 vote [washingtonpost.com]:

The Senate on Tuesday confirmed Lina Khan to the Federal Trade Commission, elevating one of the tech industry’s most prominent antitrust critics to the government’s 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, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox [yalelawjournal.org],” which argued that decades-old antitrust laws aren’t 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 Judiciary’s antitrust panel, where she helped lead an investigation into the tech giants. That probe’s findings of monopoly-style tactics [washingtonpost.com] 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 FTC’s 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.

Khan is one of several critics of big tech that Biden has brought into his administration. Tim Wu, who has called for antitrust action against the tech giants, works on competition and technology policy on the National Economic Council. Vanita Gupta, who has criticized big tech’s civil rights record, is now associate attorney general at the Justice Department.

But Biden has yet to put forth nominees for other key tech enforcement positions in the administration, and it’s unclear if he will elevate people more aligned with Khan or more business-friendly Democrats. Nearly five months into his term, Biden has not yet announced his nominee for the top spot in the Justice Department antitrust division, or to fill a vacancy at the Federal Communications Commission.

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