Politico: FTC Democrat hires tech industry critic who's taken aim at Amazon
"FTC Democratic Commissioner Rohit Chopra is hiring Lina Khan, one of the country's foremost critics of the growing market power of U.S. tech companies and the author of a landmark paper making an antitrust case against Amazon.
Chopra's move is a sign that the newly-minted commissioner is preparing to take a tough stand against Silicon Valley. He's doing so as political figures on both the left and right, including President Donald Trump, call for greater checks on the tech industry.
A 2017 graduate of Yale Law School, Khan made her name with an academic paper called "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox"that argues that the current U.S. approach to antitrust law hasn't kept pace with technology and fails to accurately measure the anti-competitive threat posed by companies like Amazon.
She maintained that simply because companies offer Americans obvious benefits like lower prices — criteria under the so-called consumer welfare test — that doesn't mean they should be exempt from antitrust scrutiny. In the paper, she floated the idea of either breaking up Amazon or regulating it like a public utility.
Khan has more recently served as the director of legal policy at the Open Markets Institute, an advocacy group that has become perhaps Washington's highest-profile champion for the idea that the U.S. approach to antitrust has failed to counter the negative effects of technology behemoths like Amazon, Google and Facebook..."