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"We don't have to live with monopolies":
The lawyer
Lina Khan
is considered to be the head of a new antitrust movement
Photo: The Washington Post / The Washington Post via Getty Images
US President
Joe Biden
(78) brings harsh critics from the Silicon Valley giants into his government.
As the Washington news magazine "Politico" reports, Biden wants to appoint the young lawyer
Lina Khan
(32) to the executive committee of the US antitrust authority FTC, which is considered the intellectual head of a new militant antitrust movement.
The personality has also been confirmed by other media sources such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Previously, Biden had already brought the prominent New York monopoly critic
Tim Wu
(49) to the National Economic Council (NEC), which coordinates the economic strategy in the White House.
So far, Wu and Khan have taught at Columbia University in New York.
As a law student at Yale, Khan published a groundbreaking essay that changed the antitrust debate in the United States.
Her article "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox", published in the "Yale Law Journal" in 2017, became the starting point for a new, critical view of the expansion of the online retailer and other dominant corporations in an interview with manager magazin, who called for "real intervention by the state".
Until then, antitrust lawyers had assessed monopoly tendencies solely on the basis of whether they were disadvantageous for consumers.
The approach of the new movement, also known as "Hipster Antitrust", sees harmful monopolies at work, for example, when Amazon depresses prices and thus forces suppliers out of the market.
According to Khan and colleagues, the aim is to go back to the original idea of monopoly laws to protect workers and producers.
When the US judiciary smashed the oil giant Standard Oil in 1911, it wasn't about consumer protection.
"We have to go back to the values that lawmakers once had in mind," Khan told manager magazin.
Who will lead the FTC in the future?
Tim Wu, previously Professor of Law, Science and Technology at Columbia Law School, is one of the most prominent US antitrust lawyers and big tech critics.
His most recent book "The Curse of Bigness: How Corporate Giants Came to Rule the World" (2020) is a strong plea for an aggressive anti-trust policy.
Previously, Wu was known as the creator of the term net neutrality.
According to him, the internet must be seen as a public good.
Accordingly, there should be no priority for certain data transfers, neither for state censorship nor for commercial interests of corporations.
With the two personalities, the new president is sending a strong signal and is addressing a topic that was promoted in the Democrats' primary campaign primarily by his left-wing rival
Elizabeth Warren
(71).
However, it remains to be seen what influence Khan and Wu will actually have in the government.
The FTC antitrust authority is led by five commissioners.
Two of them were appointed by the Republicans and voted against an antitrust lawsuit filed by the agency against Facebook last year.
Biden can fill another post and thus create a majority.
Much depends on who of the five commissioners will lead the authority in the future.
In addition, Biden has to fill the head of the antitrust law department in the Justice Department.
Corporations had hoped for a friendly Biden government
The Democratic Party, traditionally closely associated with Silicon Valley, has been moving away from Big Tech for a long time.
In October, the House Legal Affairs Committee, with a Democratic majority, recommended breaking up Amazon, Apple, Alphabet and Facebook.
Lina Khan contributed to the report as a contributor to MP
David Cicilline
(59).
The Republicans are campaigning, partly for different reasons, partly with different methods, also for a break in the digital monopolies.
Even under the Trump administration, several antitrust lawsuits were filed against Google by the Justice Department and a number of Republican-ruled states last fall.
Because of Joe Biden's past as Vice President in the corporate-friendly Obama administration and the tendency towards moderate tones, many in Silicon Valley had hoped that the new administration would curb the zeal of Congress.
Then it does not look like the new personal details.
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