On June 15, the U.S. Senate approved Lina Khan's nomination
as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by a 69-28
vote. Her confirmation assured that the Democrats would hold a 3-2
majority of commissioners. Later that day, in a move that surprised
many, President Biden selected Ms. Khan as the new FTC chair. At
age 32, she is the youngest person ever to hold this office.
While still a Yale Law School student, Chair Khan made a name
for herself in 2017 after authoring a paper critical of the
concentration of technology companies that The New York
Times described as "reframing decades of monopoly
law." In that paper, Khan argued that the current method for
evaluating anticompetitive harm — the impact on prices paid
by consumers — missed wide swathes of antitrust behavior in
the modern economy, such as a company using predatory pricing aimed
at lowering consumer prices in the short term to quickly capture
market share.
