From what I understand, Ms. Khan wrote some influential papers against tech monopolies. Congress, wanting to address these monopolies, put her in charge of the FTC purely for this reason, as she has very little experience in anything I would assume to be necessary for running a massive government office.
It seems odd to me, but I don’t really follow the FTC. Am I just being cynical? I don’t get this move and it feels very one-dimensional to me.
My mom says I should have been a politician...
Edit: I'm not saying that's what's happening now. I have no idea whether Lina Khan is qualified or not
Personally, I think 32 is an OK age for such an appointment, especially if you have background in relevant subject matter. For many of these appointments you're looking for someone to set direction / mission, rather than micromanagement if the org is already functioning at a relatively high level (FTC is #2 ranked employer for mid-sized agencies which tells me they're doing OK by that standard).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit....
As the sibling notes, the current median age for a US president at inauguration is 55. Most people weren't expected to even live to 55 back then.
(Although, you can make the argument that life expectancy figures can be skewed downward by high infant mortality to the point where they're not that useful a measure anymore.)
When I was young I too thought I knew all I needed to know. The older I get the more I understand that experience is very important.
Less likely to ask Google how an ad showed up on their kid's iPhone, for example.
Pointless anecdote, but my friend, who is a well educated non-tech white collar professional in their upper 20s who is very active on tiktok/IG, recently let on that they believed cell phones communicated directly with satellites. I asked them why they thought dead zones existed in the countryside, and they said that was probably because there wasn't a satellite overhead. I asked them why they thought they were called "cellular phones", and after a minute of pondering it must be because the phones are very small.
What really matters is if she and her assistants can do anything about the Big Tech problem or not. Otherwise it's a huge waste of time and nothing happens.
Obviously not a be-all, and highly dependent on experience (e.g. are you 32 and spent all your life in academia, or 32 and have 10 years of industry experience, or somewhere in between).
You can also make a myriad of applicable observations based on age, but ultimately it's probably relevant because she is the youngest person in that position ever.
In a democracy, the media has all the real power. That’s why we’re seeing endless op-eds against tech.
A journalist can see reasonable success reporting important stories, big tech only sees success reporting popular stories. Let's not pretend they're doing the same job, journalists have a legitimate beef with big tech.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/15/health-care-data-sh...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/epic-ceo-sends-letter-urging...
misdirection must be the most effective strategy of all time. in an alternate universe this would be "Lina Khan: The 32-year-old taking on ISPs" and there would be an identical comment to yours lamenting why Big Tech isn't being investigated
If they are 'brilliant' - that's great - then the should be senior advisors to the Head of the Commission, not Head of the Commission.
We don't want theoretical ideologues in those kinds of positions.
We ended up with companies like Facebook partly because we put 'really young people in enormous positions of power'.
These kinds of jobs is also as much about politics, people, relationships and 'knowing the system' as they are 'being brilliant'.
At my age, I'm keenly aware at how I was not ready for a whole bunch of things 10 years ago. Experience is real, just just 'an age'.
Edit: responding to the commentor below, yes thanks I should have added, at age 32 you're not tangled up in a web of politics. Also what's hard to describe is that the wager and risk becomes much great as you go on. At 32, you have your life ahead of you, you can burn political capital. At 50, you have to absolutely be making sure you're either 1) keeping your job a long time or 2) making a major transition, enabled by doing favours, political things etc. - you have your retirement, a spouse and 3 kids all going to Uni to worry about. That mental state is an advantage. But again, the skills you start to gain after age 32 matter a lot and that someone who's brilliant like this is much better able to help as a senior adviser to someone with the organizational political skills.
Legal director at the Open Markets Institute, became Columbia Law School academic fellow, a Legal Fellow at the FTC, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law (leading the congressional investigation) and published The Separation of Platforms and Commerce.
Government is absolutely packed with old people[1], to the point where the young don't have much of a voice despite being a large US demographic. The average age of the 117th Congress is 59 years old. Only a single Senator is under 40. The house has only one member born in the 90s. The age groups with the biggest gains compared to the last Congress are 80+ and 50-59. Congress is old and getting older.
1: https://fiscalnote.com/blog/how-old-is-the-117th-congress
On the flip side, I'm not sure we really want the "move fast and break things" mentality moving into government, which seems to be a feature of leaders with less to lose.
(Certainly government moves too slowly most of the time, but there has to be a middle ground.)
As someone who doesn't know much about economics, I never assumed that a monopoly would be merely defined as a cost-based analysis of corporate products. I assumed basically what the paper was arguing was how the system worked - you can be a monopoly even while providing the lowest cost to consumers.
There are economists in industrial organization who think big tech firms need a different regulatory approach. This is fair. But this opinion is not generally informed by khan’s arguments.
In my opinion, you can make the case for regulating tech firms most easily for Facebook (which acquired competitors WhatsApp and Instagram and probably shouldn’t have been allowed to).
The big tech firms have also done things occasionally which are clearly anticompetitive. Google and Facebook had a (recently revealed) secret anticompetitive agreement about bidding on ads, for example. That was a clear antitrust violation. Likely Google’s payment to Apple to remain the default search engine on iOS is at least questionable.
I say all of this to illustrate that I’m not a skeptic about regulating tech firms vis antitrust law.
However, the firm where I think this is hardest is Amazon. I don’t see them as being too large or too dominant. As of 2019 Walmart did about 3 times as much retail business as Amazon, iirc. Amazon faces competition from Walmart, Target, and any firm who sells a product online. The cost of going to a competitor’s website is zero. If consumers are repeatedly buying from Amazon instead, that’s a sign that Amazon is doing something right.
The claim is made here frequently that AWS is a monopoly. That is very hard to square with the existence of serious competitors like Microsoft and Google.
To respond to one more of your points: if you achieve a near monopoly by offering lower prices we economists would say that is good! Quantities are high and prices are low. You are a better option than your competitors. Khan seems to think that this is somehow bad for consumers, perhaps bc “eventually” Amazon will raise prices. (This is not remotely plausible.)
If you want a vastly, VASTLY better take on modern antitrust which includes good discussion of tech firms and dominant platforms, read “the antitrust paradigm” by jonathan baker.
Why occasionally? The vast majority of their products at the very least seem like textbook cases of predatory pricing to this layman. Throw in all the other anticompetitive stuff and big tech starts to look like the Uber/Airbnb of the rule of law.
That's new! Borkism! The terms of anti-trust were redefined in Reagan's time by Robert Bork, an appeals court judge & attorney general under Nixon (and failed Supreme Court nominee, thank the stars).
Cory Doctorow had a bunch of threads on this shift on what anti-trust is. I think this modern re-definition is incredibly incredibly important, at the crux of what happened to let the competitiveness in the US collapse, to allow giant monopolies & this acquisition culture to form. I guess the main thread is [1]. There's also discussion on Klobuchar's trust-busting desires[2], and NY attempting some reform[3], and some other mentions, all of which mention Bork & this recent narrowing re-definition. The last starts off with a discussion of Kahn's Anti-trust Paradox, ha!
This very much feels like a root cause, of how America became utterly ineffective at regulating anti-trust behavior & monopolies: limiting the definition of what it would consider to cost-based analysis of corporate products. Unbelievably limiting view, huge screw up.
Wikipedia page on Robert Bork for some more general background: [4].
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/10/borked/
[2] https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/06/calera/
[3] https://doctorow.medium.com/new-york-to-revolutionize-antitr...
That said, that and one other paper got her tenure (not just tenure track) at Columbia Law.
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate by Lina Khan https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/article/9/3/131/4915966
(US moved into Borkian antitrust principles in the Reagan era, New Braindeis Movement moves is correction to more conventional view of antitrust)
Genuine question. I've primarily seen vague praise of the anti-trust stance (no specifics) and fawning/consternation over her age.
