Lina Khan: who is the young lawyer who is challenging the enormous power of Amazon and the tech giants in the US

It all started with an academic article published in 2017 in Yale Law Journaljournal of the Yale University School of Law.

Title: “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.”

His thesis was that behind Amazon, which on the surface looks like a competitive market offering low prices for consumers, is hidden monopolistic practices throughout the trade chain.

“Current doctrine underestimates the risk of predatory pricing and how integration between different lines of business can be anticompetitive,” wrote 27-year-old law student Lina Khan.

Khan compared this to what happened in the United States between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when railroads were crucial to the country’s economic development and the use of that infrastructure was regulated by law.

“Thousands of independent retailers and businesses that must follow Amazon’s lead to reach the market are increasingly relying on their biggest competitor,” Khan said in his 2017 article.

This week, from her position as chair of the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC), along with the attorneys general of 17 states, sued the e-commerce giant for antitrust practices.

Infrastructure for the digital age

The daughter of Pakistani parents, Khan was born in London in 1989 and moved to the United States when she was 11 years old.

He studied law at Yale, graduating in 2017, and quickly became known for his stance on Amazon and other big tech companies.

In an interview with the BBC in 2021, before taking over the FTC, Khan spoke about how she became interested in competition law as a public policy researcher.

“What I noticed is that there were some a systematic trend across the United States toward concentration (…), the markets have become under the control of a very small number of companies,” he said.

Gradually, their attention began to focus on the competition – or rather the perceived lack of competition – in Silicon Valley.

His general criticism is that big tech companies are just too big: a few of them dominate the market at the expense of the competition.

“These companies are essentially providing the infrastructure for the digital age,” he said.

“A small group of private executives sets the rules about who can use the infrastructure and under what conditions,” he said.

“Even when services are good for consumers, they can harm a whole range of other interests, whether it’s workers, business start-ups or democracy in general,” he told the BBC.

After dropping out of college, Khan spent several months in 2018 as legal counsel to the Democratic commissioner of the FTC during the administration of Republican Donald Trump, and the following year she went to work for the House Antitrust Subcommittee, where he collaborated on research into digital markets.

In 2020, he started teaching at Columbia University, and the following year She was appointed by President Joe Biden to head the FTC, an organization that protects consumers from bad business practices and companies from unfair competition.

“Great news”

At the time, his appointment was welcomed by antitrust activists, and especially by Democrats.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who has pushed for a breakup of the tech giants in her 2020 presidential campaign, described Khan’s appointment as “terrible news”.

At the age of 32, she became the youngest president of the Commission in history.

Since then, Khan is preparing a case against Amazon to present in court.

And although both Democrats and Republicans accused technology companies of alleged unfair competition, Khan did not enjoy the support of conservatives, who accused her of, for example, “bullying” the social network X (formerly Twitter) after it was bought by billionaire Elon Musk.

“She is trying to initiate a radical shift from the norms that made America’s economy great toward a system in which she and her cronies have unlimited power over the business practices of our country, unbound by any reasonable interpretation of precedent or statutory law,” the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said in July. House Judiciary, Republican Jim Jordan.

Fire resistant

The case against Amazon is considered as a key test to measure Khan’s leadership since he hasn’t done much against big tech so far despite his strong rhetoric.

In February, he failed in an attempt to prevent Meta – Facebook’s parent company – from buying virtual reality company Within, and in July the same thing happened when he tried to prevent Microsoft from completing a deal to buy the video game maker. Call of duty.

A complaint filed by the FTC against Amazon on Tuesday says the company run by tycoon Jeff Bezos uses a “set of interlocking anti-competitive and unfair strategies” to raise prices and stifle competition.

The regulator also said the internet giant’s actions “reduce quality for customers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation and prevent competitors from competing fairly against Amazon.”

The company responded by saying the lawsuit was “factually and legally incorrect” and that they looked forward to seeing it in court.

He added that if the FTC’s “wrongdoing” lawsuit is successful, that would mean fewer products to choose from, higher prices and slower deliveries for consumers.

US antitrust law is complicated, but plaintiffs generally must show that companies acted in a way that financially harmed consumers.

This is not always easy to demonstrate when it comes to tech giants, since many of their services are free, such as Google’s search engine or Meta’s social network Instagram.

Despite this, regulators and prosecutors in the US seem determined to fight the anti-competitive practice, as shown by the lawsuit against Amazon or the trial that began in mid-September in which the Justice Department accuses Google of abusing its dominant position in search services.