Lina Khan has most certainly faced some growing pains as the head of the FTC, occasionally filing some undercooked cases and raising the hackles of some staff (some grumbling about real missteps, some simply grumbling about reform). At the same time, she’s the closest the U.S. has gotten to a competent antitrust enforcer any time in the last forty years; and corporate America certainly isn’t happy about it.
There’s been a growing coalition of companies and major tech billionaires (like Reid Hoffman) that have been openly pressuring Harris to ditch Khan. Often, as in the case of media billionaires like Barry Diller, without much in the way of subtlety:
“Diller, for his part, laid into Khan publicly in July, calling her a “dope” on national television, a remark that he later walked back, calling her “smart,” but “disrupting sensible business combinations.” To the ire of many of Khan’s supporters, the Harris campaign has remained silent on her future.”
Most corporations and billionaires prefer their regulators to be heavily decorative. It’s what drove them to pressure the Supreme Court to recently neuter what’s left of regulatory independence. They generally want officials that talk mindlessly about innovation and small business, while rubber stamping an endless parade of consolidative mergers that, more often than not, trample competition, small businesses, and real innovation underfoot.
The Harris campaign has remained largely silent on whether Khan will be allowed to stick around. And it remains entirely unclear whether Harris will continue Biden’s support of something that, for once, at least vaguely resembles antitrust reform and a crackdown of concentrated corporate power.
These days, only position-less, feckless careerists have much of a chance of surviving the congressional nomination process, something clearly demonstrated when the Biden administration tried to appoint popular telecom and media reformer Gigi Sohn to the FCC. Any effort to implement meaningful antitrust reform, however subtle, is immediately framed as both radical and an assault on free market innovation.
Khan’s nomination was surprising in that not only did the Biden team quickly appoint Khan, but they immediately promoted her to agency boss before Corporate America could galvanize much of a response (luxuries that Sohn, who found herself the subject of a yearlong telecom industry smear campaign without much in the way of Biden messaging support, didn’t get to enjoy).
As Dell Cameron at Wired notes, new polling suggests that 80% of Democrats feel that the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies. 90% of Democrats believe lobbyists and corporate executives hold too much power over the government. While it wasn’t always applied efficiently or consistently (the Biden FCC, for example, struggles to even publicly acknowledge that telecom monopolies cause widespread competitive and consumer harms), Biden did make an effort at monopoly busting.
Khan supporters and consumer groups have taken to creating mock websites highlighting her opposition by billionaires. A Trump victory will, of course, immediately result in Khan’s ouster, returning us to an era where the country’s top “antitrust enforcers” actively work with companies in their personal time to help them dodge regulatory accountability (see: Trump appointee Makan Delrahim and T-Mobile).
Right now, Harris is remaining ambiguous about whether Khan will be allowed to stay at her post; allowing voters to fill in the blanks using vibes and their imagination. Whether Khan is kept in office, or replaced with yet another cookie cutter careerist, should prove pretty immediately telling in the new year.