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Lina Khan published “The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Anti-monopoly Debate,” which identifies key tenets of the new anti-monopoly movement, in the Journal of European Competition Law & Practice.
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Lina Khan published an op-ed in the New York Times explaining how the Ohio v. American Express Supreme Court case could shield tech corporations like Amazon, Google, and Facebook from antitrust scrutiny.
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Amazon, Khan told me, should be viewed “as an infrastructure company.” And as a group, big tech “are utilities on which other companies depend,” equating to the 19th century railroads, which their owners exploited to outsized profit advantage because they could.
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The company has established its level of dominance because of the failings of our current antitrust laws. To understand why, you first need to understand the scope of Amazon’s power.
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Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce. In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space. Although Amazon has clocked staggering growth, it generates meager profits, choosing to price below-cost and expand widely instead.
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In 1938, as the country sank into recession and national unemployment hit 19 percent, President Roosevelt announced that America had a monopoly problem. In a historic speech to Congress, Roosevelt warned that extreme consolidation was hampering the economy and threatening our democracy. “Among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing,” Roosevelt said. “This concentration is seriously impairing the economic effectiveness of private enterprise as a way of providing employment for labor and capital, and as a way of assuring a more equitable distribution of income and earnings among the people of the nation as a whole.”
The speech signaled a new intellectual direction for his Administration, heralding what would come to drive the second major phase of the New Deal: anti-monopoly policy.
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One underexplored theme in the debate around economic inequality is the role of monopoly and oligopoly power. Despite the relative lack of attention to this topic, there is sound reason to believe that pervasive market power in the economy has contributed to the high level of economic inequality in the United States today. Given the general affluence of shareholders and executives relative to consumers — as well as the power dynamics within large companies — we can expect market power to have significant regressive distributional effects.
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The agency’s antitrust policy isn’t up to the challenges of the 21st century. Here’s how to fix it.
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We can “invent our way out” of climate change, but will Big Ag embrace it? If we find ourselves living in a new era of food shortages, it will not be due only to our failure to control carbon. It will be due even more to our failure to protect the open-market systems that empower us not merely to exchange, but to think and adapt.
Continue ReadingIn America today, wealth and political power are more concentrated than at any point in our country’s history.
The Open Markets Institute, formerly the Open Markets program at New America, was founded to protect liberty and democracy from these extreme -- and growing -- concentrations of private power.
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Lina Khan
Director of Legal Policy
Lina Khan is Director of Legal Policy with the Open Markets Institute. She researches antitrust law and competition policy and identifies potential legal reforms.
Khan’s work has been published by the Yale Law Journal and the Harvard Law & Policy Review, as well as by the New York Times, Politico, and Washington Post. Her piece “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” won the Yale Law Journal’s Michael Egger Prize and the Yale Law School’s Israel H. Peres Prize. Her antitrust work has been cited by The Atlantic, Bloomberg, The Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal, and she has appeared on C-SPAN, NPR, and Fox Business News.
From 2015-2017 Khan litigated on behalf of homeowners against financial institutions through Yale’s Mortgage Foreclosure Litigation Clinic, and spent summers litigating at Gupta Wessler PLLC, Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She received a B.A. magna cum laude from Williams College and a J.D. from Yale Law School.