# Lina Khan **Lina Khan** (b. March 3, 1989, London) chaired the [[FTC]] from June 2021 to January 2025 and is the person most responsible for turning the [[New Brandeis Movement]] from a law-review argument into federal enforcement policy. Her 2017 Yale Law Journal note "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" — written as a student, its title a direct answer to [[Robert Bork]]'s *The Antitrust Paradox* — argued that the [[Consumer Welfare Standard]] was structurally blind to a platform that builds dominance by forgoing profit, because the standard only looks at price. Four years later she was running the agency that would test the claim. ## Before the FTC Williams College (2010), then four years at the New America Foundation's Open Markets program under Barry Lynn — the incubator of the neo-Brandeisian revival and, after the 2017 split from New America over Google criticism, the independent [[Open Markets Institute]]. Yale Law (2017); counsel to the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee's 2019–20 Big Tech investigation; Columbia Law School associate professor from July 2020. Nominated by Biden on March 22, 2021 and confirmed **69–28 on June 15, 2021** — the bipartisan margin is the tell that "break up Big Tech" had a Republican constituency — and designated chair the same day, at 32 the youngest in the agency's history. ## The docket What the chair actually did, as distinct from what was said about her: - **Retrospective platform cases.** Inherited and pressed [[FTC v. Meta]] ([[Instagram]]/[[WhatsApp]] divestiture; lost at trial November 2025 on market definition, on appeal). Filed [[FTC v. Amazon]] on September 26, 2023 with 17 states and Puerto Rico — the case her note predicted — now set for a bench trial beginning March 29, 2027. - **Merger enforcement.** Blocked Kroger–Albertsons (December 2024) and Tapestry–Capri (November 2024); with [[Jonathan Kanter]] at the [[Antitrust Division]], rewrote the [[Merger Guidelines]] (December 18, 2023) around the structural presumption of *Philadelphia National Bank* and added labor markets and serial acquisitions. - **Labor.** Treated [[Monopsony]] as an antitrust problem. The April 2024 rule banning most [[Non-Compete Agreement]]s was struck down in *Ryan v. FTC* (N.D. Tex., August 2024); her successor abandoned the appeal on September 5, 2025. - **Consumer protection.** Junk-fee and "click-to-cancel" rules, right-to-repair, drug-pricing suits against pharmacy benefit managers. She left the chair on January 20, 2025 and the commission on January 31. ## Reception on the right Khan is a rare figure whom the vault's antagonists split over. The business-conservative position treated her as the emblem of regulatory overreach. The populist position — [[JD Vance]] said she was "doing a pretty good job," and Matt Gaetz and Josh Hawley defended her — adopted her structural critique while reframing the harm as platform *censorship* rather than platform *power*. That reframing is the whole content of her successor [[Andrew Ferguson]]'s tenure: he kept her merger guidelines and her Meta and Amazon cases and dropped her rulemaking, which is the "Khanservative" synthesis in practice. The [[FTC]] page carries the fuller version of that split. ## After the FTC: New York Khan co-chaired [[Zohran Mamdani]]'s mayoral transition from November 2025, took over Columbia's new Center for Law and the Economy in April 2026, and on **July 22, 2026** was appointed board chair of the New York City Economic Development Corporation — the agency that controls the city's major development projects and subsidies. It is the first time a neo-Brandeisian has held an economic-development post rather than an enforcement one, and it is where the argument that concentration is a *political* problem gets tested on land use, procurement and industrial policy instead of mergers. ## See Also - [[Antitrust]] · [[Consumer Welfare Standard]] · [[New Brandeis Movement]] - [[FTC]] · [[Andrew Ferguson]] · [[Jonathan Kanter]] - [[FTC v. Amazon]] · [[FTC v. Meta]] · [[Merger Guidelines]] - [[Monopsony]] · [[Non-Compete Agreement]] - [[Zohran Mamdani]]