This story is part of a special series celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
Before she became the youngest head of the Federal Trade Commission in history in 2021 (at 32), Lina Khan spent a lot of time thinking about chickens. Specifically, while working as a researcher at the think tank New America after college, she investigated how giant chicken processing companies forced small farmers into opaque, lopsided contracts that jeopardized their livelihoods and scared them from speaking up.
And government regulators weren’t acting. As long as these monopolies weren’t hiking prices for consumers, the prevailing thinking went, there wasn’t much for antitrust enforcers to do. “It made a deep impression on me,” Khan says, and sent her on the path to becoming perhaps the country’s most ambitious, compelling, and controversial antitrust thinker in a generation.
As a law student, she published a groundbreaking article in The Yale Law Journal that generated coverage in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” argued that antitrust enforcers should move away from their singular fixation on price and focus on the broader range of harms that arise from anticompetitive behavior. As FTC chair, she’s infused the sleepy agency with that same thinking, while bringing lawsuits against Big Tech.
She has notched some major victories, including in challenges against Nvidia and the biotech firm Illumina. She’s also suffered some high-profile losses, against the likes of Microsoft and Meta. But perhaps her most important contribution has been advancing the idea that in a truly competitive economy, costs aren’t the only thing that count. Here’s how she approaches her work:
My job at [New America] was to document how various markets had evolved over the last few decades. A theme seemed to emerge. We had gone from markets where you had dozens of major players to markets being controlled by a very small number of companies.
If you were a chicken farmer in America, oftentimes you were dependent on a single processing company, and the power of that company could be used in all sorts of pretty abusive ways. When we think about people’s constitutional rights, we think about how you have to protect those rights and liberties from government power. Here was a vivid illustration of how concentrations of private power could also undermine people’s rights and liberties.
I’ve [made] sure the FTC is opening its doors. We’ve heard from parents who have lost kids to social media bullying, people who are rationing insulin because it’s too expensive, gig drivers who are complaining about opaque tactics by the platforms. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out how you can be most effective. We’ve focused on where we see the biggest harm people are facing in their day-to-day lives.
We also want to be forward-looking. That requires monitoring markets that are quickly evolving. There have been a lot of lessons from the Web 2.0 era. In the early 2000s, the view of a lot of policymakers and enforcers was that digital markets move so quickly, the best thing for the government to do is to just get out of the way. Two decades on, we realized that was shortsighted. Digital markets, particularly, lend themselves to allowing monopolization. Network effects and reinforcing advantages of data can allow dominant firms to dig deep moats and fortify those moats.
It’s been exciting to see the bipartisan agreement on these issues. There’s a growing recognition among conservatives that monopolization and concentration of private power can threaten people’s liberties. People often feel like they’re not getting a fair shake in our economy, and a big priority for me at the FTC has been making sure we’re standing up for people when they’re being abused by dominant corporations. Over the last few years, the FTC has tried to show the public what it looks like for a government agency to be on their side.