FTC Chair Lina Khan on Antitrust in the age of Amazon

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

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Summary

When Lina Khan was in law school back in 2017, she wrote a law review article called 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,' that went kinda viral in policy circles. In it, she argued that antitrust enforcement in the U.S. was behind the times. For decades, regulators had focused narrowly on consumer welfare, and they'd bring companies to court only when they thought consumers were being harmed by things like rising prices. But in the age of digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook, Khan argued in the article, the time had come for a more proactive approach to antitrust.

Just four years later, President Biden appointed Lina Khan to be the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the main government agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust in America, putting her in the rare position of putting some of her ideas into practice.

Now, two years into the job, Khan has taken some big swings at big tech companies like Meta and Microsoft. But the FTC has also faced a couple of big losses in the courts. On today's show, a conversation with FTC Chair Lina Khan on what it's like to try to turn audacious theory into bureaucratic practice, the FTC's new lawsuit against Amazon, and what it all means for business as usual.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:07.0	Last week I had a chance to sit down with Lena Kahn.
0:11.0	Hey! Hey, Alexi. I have to say this was super exciting because
0:18.6	Lena Kahn is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which among among other things, regulates how big companies
0:24.4	can get in the U.S.
0:25.8	Okay, so just to start, I have to ask, when you're a kid, was Monopoly your favorite
0:31.2	board game?
0:32.2	No, I think it was probably like snakes and ladders.
0:36.6	Nevertheless, Lena is now helping set the rules for the real-life game of Monopoly playing
0:41.8	out across the American economy.
0:44.3	As FTC Chair, she is one of the country's top antitrust cops, policing companies as they
0:49.8	vie for bigger and bigger slices of any given market.
0:54.0	Now, for a long time, antitrust was kind of this sleepy policy backwater.
0:59.0	The prevailing theory of how to police monopoly power
1:02.0	had basically been to let the market sort it out on its own
1:05.2	unless you could prove that consumers were clearly getting harmed.
1:09.0	But a few years ago in 2017, Lena Kahn rocketed into the national conversation
1:14.2	with a simple but radical argument,
1:16.5	which is that we had been doing everything wrong,
1:19.6	and that by now it was exacting this hidden toll
1:22.2	on our everyday lives.
1:23.6	Monopoly power and consolidation can make the difference between whether you have to drive
	...

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