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In 2013 before Halloween, Lina Khan he walked through his wide range of sweets at his local Safeway supermarket and came up with a disturbing revelation.
Approximately 40 candy brands on the shelves offered only a mirror of consumer choice; in fact, there were only two or three confectioners. Khan, a junior political analyst at the time, was so embarrassed that he wrote about it In Time magazine. “If we want a healthier, more diverse market and a greater variety in Halloween packaging, we can start repealing some anti-competitive laws.”
Khan’s critique of corporate power has gone beyond the Big Candy. He has drawn similar conclusions, studied concentration problems and monopolistic behaviors in the aircraft and metal sectors. And he began to pay more attention to the excessive impact of the market Big Tech, eventually became one of his most vocal and prominent critics.
So Khan, who is only 32 years old, was there this week touched U.S. President Joe Biden, who was the main regulator for the Federal Trade Commission, sent waves through Washington, Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Above all, it is hoped that he will now seek to usher in a new era of anti-American monopoly enforcement.
“It’s in power now, and it’s scary,” says Robert Kaminski, managing director of Capital Alpha Partners, a Washington-based research policy group. “He has a hammer and all he sees are nails,” he added.
Khan was born and raised in London, to Pakistani parents; the family moved to the U.S. when he was 11 years old. The first sign of his interest in unfair corporate behavior came early.
A Starbucks cafe on the street from Mamaroneck High School in the northeast suburbs of New York was leaving teenagers sitting because they were bustling. Anger ensued, which Khan recounted in his school newspaper and later picked up by the New York Times.
He went to Khan Williams College where he studied political theory. After graduating, he came to Washington with a job at the New America Foundation, which allowed him to study center-left thinking, entrepreneurship, and competition.
“At one time we had a lot of independent businesses in place, a lot of local businesses, diverse,” he said he said In 2012, “we see only a few companies that control almost every industry.”
Khan finally landed at Yale Law School, and in January 2017 he published an article in the Yale Law Journal that would catapult him to fame: “The Amazon Monopoly Paradox”.
The piece went viral. “You can almost imagine the first article that became a kind of revival of monopoly revisionism,” says Robert Hockett, a professor of corporate law at Cornell University.
At the core of Khan’s philosophy is that companies, including Amazon, have used a lax anti-monopoly study for decades, at a time when low consumer prices became a major factor in consolidating competition policy. It envisages a different anti-monopoly regime, XX. Similar to what it was in the first century, when U.S. authorities were reluctant to break monopolies.
Amazon has declined to comment on its appointment.
“What it’s doing is bringing monopoly and market policy back to the status quo ante, from the’ 60s to the ’60s to the’ 70s to the ’70s, as well as the’ 70s, ”says David Singh Grewal, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
People who know Khan – who is married to a cardiologist – say it is disproportionate and quite reserved.
“He really keeps his private life private,” Grewal says. “It’s easy to think that it’s the face of the ‘millennium’, sometimes called the ‘hipster’, the antitrust, but it’s very different from the social media phenomenon that’s emerging around it.”
After graduating with a law degree, Khan became a professor at Columbia and also worked with the Open Markets Institute, an anti-monopoly think tank in Washington. At Capitol Hill, he helped channel the probe of the antitrust committee of Home Judges into Big Tech. Many Republicans are still wary. “His views on antitrust enforcement are also far removed from a cautious view of the law,” Utah Sen. Mike Lee said in March.
But Khan stood up in democratic circles, reaching out to traditional Big Tech critics like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders to join more leading politicians like Biden. However, although he was expected to get a place in the FTC as a commissioner, few anticipated that he would be elected to direct the agency.
“He’s really managed to climb to the top so fast. And I’d say he’s been incredibly impressive,” says Kate Judge, a professor at Columbia University School of Law.
Sarah Miller, executive director of the American Economic Liberties Project, calls the monopoly “Simone Biles” of Khan, breaking the U.S. Olympic gymnast record. “By proving that America has this massive crisis of concentration… It had a role to play in making people realize that more traditional democratic circles needed to turn the page…. That was clearly what helped to correct that.”
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