2023-11-04
30 分钟When Lina Khan was in law school back in 2017, she wrote a law review article called 'Amazon's Antitrust Paradox,' that went kinda viral in policy circles. In it, she argued that antitrust enforcement in the U.S. was behind the times. For decades, regulators had focused narrowly on consumer welfare, and they'd bring companies to court only when they thought consumers were being harmed by things like rising prices. But in the age of digital platforms like Amazon and Facebook, Khan argued in the article, the time had come for a more proactive approach to antitrust. Just four years later, President Biden appointed Lina Khan to be the Chair of the Federal Trade Commission, one of the main government agencies responsible for enforcing antitrust in America, putting her in the rare position of putting some of her ideas into practice. Now, two years into the job, Khan has taken some big swings at big tech companies like Meta and Microsoft. But the FTC has also faced a couple of big losses in the courts. On today's show, a conversation with FTC Chair Lina Khan on what it's like to try to turn audacious theory into bureaucratic practice, the FTC's new lawsuit against Amazon, and what it all means for business as usual. Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoices NPR Privacy Policy
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Last week, I had a chance to sit down with Lena Khan.
Hey.
Hey, I'm Lena.
Hey, Alexi.
Nice to meet you.
Nice to meet you.
And.
Okay, Alexi, I have to say this was super exciting cause Lena Khan is the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, which, among other things, regulates how big companies can get in the US.
Okay, so just to start, I have to ask, when you were a kid, I was monopoly your favorite board game?
No, I think it was probably like snakes and ladders.
Nevertheless, Lena is now helping set the rules for the real life game of monopoly playing out across the american economy.
As FTC chair, she is one of the country's top antitrust cops, policing companies as they vie for bigger and bigger slices of any given market.
Now, for a long time, antitrust was kind of this sleepy policy backwater.
The prevailing theory of how to police monopoly had basically been to let the market sort it out on its own, unless you could prove that consumers were clearly getting harmed.
But a few years ago, in 2017, Lena Khan rocketed into the national conversation with a simple but radical argument, which is that we had been doing everything wrong and that by now it was exacting this hidden toll on our everyday lives.
Monopoly power and consolidation can make the difference between whether you have to drive 5 miles to go to the hospital or whether you're driving 50 miles to go to the hospital can be the difference between whether you're paying $4 for eggs or $10 for eggs.
It can make the difference between whether you can quit your job and have opportunities with a rival firm or whether you're in fact, just stuck working for a company, even if they're docking your wages or worsening your working conditions.
And so there are just very real material consequences of how we do antitrust.
In other words, the stakes are a lot bigger than a board game.