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Ross Douthat: Sometimes it feels like the left and right are having similar arguments about the economy these days. We have liberals, like my colleague Ezra Klein, talking about how burdensome regulation stands in the way of growth, sounding a little bit like Ronald Reagan. But then we also have right-wing populists, like Steve Bannon and sometimes Donald Trump, criticizing globalization in ways that can sound a little bit like Bernie Sanders. And I think you can see this convergence between a populist right and left play out especially in debates about the power of big corporations, where people on both sides find reasons to blame Silicon Valley or Wall Street for some of America’s discontents.
My guest today has been part of that convergence. As head of Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan’s efforts to break up corporate monopolies earned her praise from figures like Bannon and then-Senator (now vice president) JD Vance. So we’re going to talk with her about whether this interesting right-left overlap is likely to endure. And also, whether her antimonopoly diagnosis actually addresses America’s deepest problems.
Lina Khan, welcome to “Interesting Times.”
Lina Khan: Thanks so much for having me.
Douthat: So we’re sitting here, we are inside the headquarters of one of the biggest newspapers in the world. We’re conducting an interview that has been enabled by iPhones and MacBooks, products made by one of the biggest technology companies in the world. After we leave this interview, I am going to get on a train and order for my family a succession of large items on amazon.com — diapers, paper towels and so on. And then I will get home and get in a Toyota, possibly stop at Target, before I get back to my house and basically have an entire day lived in the shadow of big business. And I won’t think twice about it, in spite of having some kind of localist agrarian sympathies somewhere deep in my conservative soul. I think that’s true of how many, many Americans live.
So I want you to tell me: what is wrong — or what can be wrong — with big business?
Khan: So, antimonopoly as a philosophy and framework really adopts a skeptical posture toward unchecked concentrations of economic power. It’s basically a corollary to how we think about the need for checks and balances in our political sphere. There was a recognition that, in the way we overthrew a monarch to safeguard core liberties and freedoms, we had to protect ourselves from autocrats of trade and the entities that had come to dominate key arteries of commerce and communications, so we passed the antitrust and antimonopoly laws as a way to try to safeguard those freedoms.
The other important thing to remember is: how our markets are structured is not some inevitability. It’s deeply the product of laws and rules and policy choices that our enforcers are making. Evidence shows time and time again that when you have a reduction in competition in markets, firms can abuse that power. It can result in higher prices for consumers. It can mean lower wages for workers. It can mean fewer opportunities for small businesses and independent businesses. It can also ultimately lead people to feel less free if, in their day-to-day lives, they feel they don’t have real choice and firms can get away with abusing their power.
So there can be a range of problems more generally that emerge when you have markets that are dominated by a handful of firms that are not checked either by competition or by rules that limit their ability to coerce and abuse.
Douthat: That’s an answer that weaves political and economic arguments together. I want to slightly separate them in framing the discussion, and then we can reconnect them as we go along.
On the economic side, it feels like we’ve lived through a period, let’s say, over the last 15 years of chronic economic discontent in American life, which in the last 10 or 15 years has yielded up Donald Trump’s populism as a critique of Republican orthodoxies on issues ranging from entitlement reform to free trade. It yielded up the Bernie Sanders revolution in 2016 that did not take over the Democratic Party, but certainly disrupted it.
But there’s also a way in which this discontent has seemed often inchoate, and it sort of ping-ponged around between different issues: Is it wage stagnation that people are upset about? Is it health care costs? Is it deindustrialization?
I guess I want to know: do you think that antimonopoly and the critique of big business is a master key to understanding economic discontent in our time?
Khan: I think the issue of unchecked corporate power sits upstream from a lot of the problems that people face in their day-to-day lives.
Of course, antitrust and even antimonopoly are just one set of policy tools, and so you need other policy levers to create markets that are really serving working people in their day-to-day lives. But I do think we’ve seen this issue of monopoly power, of incumbents that are not being checked by competition, and therefore can get away with making products worse, making prices higher, not feeling a pressure to really serve their customers or compete for workers.
It also has been reflected in issues around resiliency. We saw during the pandemic, we routinely hear from senior members of the Defense Department, that extreme consolidation has also made our supply chains much more brittle. And so the manifestations of this problem are manifold and show themselves in all sorts of areas.
Douthat: Give me a couple of concrete examples. If I said to you: I’m unhappy about how health care works in America, what is the monopoly-related, corporate consolidation — related piece of that?
Khan: There are so many different monopoly stories happening in the health care system. We’ve seen time and time again consolidation of hospital systems. Practically, that has meant that prices are higher for people. It has meant that service is worse.
We’ve also seen the emergence of middlemen, these pharmacy benefit managers, that basically connect pharmaceutical companies with the pharmacists, with the insurers. We’ve seen — and the F.T.C.’s lawsuits have shown this — that the practices by these firms have resulted in skyrocketing costs, including for things like insulin.
The F.T.C.’s work, when I was there, uncovered all sorts of patenting tricks by big pharma companies that were keeping out generics, including for things like asthma inhalers, which have been around for decades, but too often, Americans were having to pay out of pocket hundreds of dollars, even though in other countries people pay as little as $7. That’s just a snapshot of some of the problems that result from a lack of competition.
One of the other big problems that I heard a lot about, including from health care workers, was the expansion of private equity into health care markets. I would hear routinely from E.R. doctors, for example, about how the expansion of private equity there had meant that there were all these punishing quotas, and E.R. doctors would have to think twice about whether they’d be able to comfort a grieving mother who had just lost her kid or have to move on to the next patient.
There are all sorts of cost effects here. People are paying more. We are seeing literal wealth transfers from Americans to these health care companies, in part because of a lack of competition. But it also manifests in all sorts of other ways in terms of degradation of service and doctors feeling like they don’t have autonomy to really do what is best for their patients and are instead having to follow these dictates of these distant giants that don’t even have a presence in the community.
Douthat: That’s a good economic argument. Now let’s talk about politics for a minute. One of the things we’re going to get into is that “Lina Khan thought,” if you will, has emphasized the role that thinking about political influence should have in antitrust. That it’s not just about where prices are set and economic outcomes; it’s also about the sheer power that a really big and powerful company can have in a democratic society.
I want you to make that concrete.
Khan: First of all, I think the economic and the political are not such sharp dichotomies. I think there is actually a gray zone in terms of how people experience the economic effects in ways that affect their own politics and their own sense of agency.
But, big picture, we see monopoly power affect our politics in a whole set of ways. They can play an outsized role in our elections, in our political system. In slightly more subtle ways, these firms end up having much more of a presence in D.C., where even outside of the electoral cycle, their views, their preferences, what issues they do want a member to take on, versus not, ends up being just much more dominant. That can really deeply skew and distort how elected officials and policymakers even understand what problems exist out in our economy.
I heard a Representative Gluesenkamp Perez recently make this point —
Douthat: Just to be clear, that’s the moderate Democratic congresswoman from the state of Washington.
Khan: That’s right. She mentioned that when she has somebody come talk to her, one of the first filters she uses is: is this person being paid to come talk to me? Or is this somebody who’s had to take time off from work and had to arrange somebody else to do a day care pickup? That ends up being very telling to her about how she should weigh somebody’s view and opinion.
More generally, we see how large corporations can also use their leverage to push back against state and local policies that they don’t like. We’ve seen big business, including big tech companies, threaten to leave certain countries if those countries pass laws that would provide more protections for their citizens, so we can see some real hardball tactics as well.
More generally, and this is especially true in areas where the government and the public ends up having outsized dependence on a single firm, it can really allow those firms to call the shots, to make certain demands, and really affect the public and the government in a negative way.
Douthat: Let’s go back in time to your younger days and talk about the development of the contemporary school of antitrust. You were in college during the financial crisis, is that right?
Khan: That’s right.
Douthat: Talk about the financial crisis for a minute and how it affected your thinking. It seems like it’s an example of where a lot of Americans were suddenly confronted with this idea of “too big to fail” as a problem of bigness that was not related necessarily to the prices that they were paying for goods or anything like that, but ended up having tremendous consequences for the economy.
Khan: The financial crisis made an impression on me in a few ways. First, it seemed to illustrate a situation where a certain domain that was viewed as appropriate just for high-level economists and experts ended up blowing up the economy. It turned out that actually, this was an area that deserved much more public scrutiny and was not something where we could just say “the experts will take care of it,” because that ended up being pretty disastrous. That, at a basic level, seeded in me a desire to really try to probe some of these areas that are treated as too complex or too opaque.
Similarly, both the lead-up to the financial crisis, but also its aftermath made a big impression on me, in terms of showing what public accountability did or did not look like. There were a handful of large financial institutions and a handful of financial executives that made decisions that ended up being deeply destabilizing for a vast majority of people in this country — I mean, we had millions of foreclosures. In law school, I ended up representing some of the homeowners who were being foreclosed on by the banks. There was so much rampant fraud in terms of what the banks were able to get away with. And in terms of who ended up bearing the costs of that fraud and those mistakes, it was overwhelmingly working families, and less so the individuals at the banks or the banks themselves.
Both of those components ended up making a big impression on me and seeded in me more of a desire to study markets and figure out what was really going on.
Douthat: Did you think that the Obama administration’s response to the financial crisis was ultimately unsuccessful? Because it seems like a certain amount of left populist perspectives on American life actually have their origins in that 2008-2010 period. And in this sense that maybe the Obama administration, in its desire to stabilize the economy, either let Wall Street get away with certain things that it shouldn’t have, or — to your example about foreclosures — basically did too much for the big banks and not enough, or even counterproductive things, for ordinary homeowners. What’s your perspective on looking back on the Obama years, especially the first term?
Khan: I try to have some humility about what people in those leadership positions were faced with when looking at a potential —
Douthat: It was not a good time.
Khan: It was not a good time. And you’re having to make decisions with incomplete information on really compressed timelines and with potentially catastrophic outcomes on the table. So I have an appreciation for just what those decision making moments can look like.
In hindsight, it does seem clear that the recovery ended up being much slower in part because there were real fears of excessive stimulation. From the perspective of homeowners, the policy was not one that was kind to them. And the foreclosures ended up, I think, having a huge effect on both people’s material lives, but also their political understanding of who our government really serves and who ends up bearing the costs when the big banks screw up.
Douthat: This is also a point of origin, I think, for right-wing populism too — though, in a peculiar way, because in certain ways, the Tea Party movement kicks off famously with Rick Santelli going on a rant complaining about homeowners being bailed out, the idea being that the homeowners had taken out these reckless mortgages and the government shouldn’t be bailing them out.
But there was always, I think, a blend in Tea Party politics of this libertarian zeal on the one hand, but then — something that I think overlaps with politics on the left — this sense that corporate America or Wall Street got away with something and Main Street was left holding the bag.
Khan: I think that’s right. The financial crisis also seemed to really force us to reckon with the market fundamentalism that had reigned supreme in both parties, candidly, for the most part since the Reagan years. The idea at its core was that the market will get it right and will figure it out, and when in doubt, the best thing for the government to do is to get out of the way. Inasmuch as we are seeing a contestation and a revisiting of some of those core assumptions in both parties, I think some of that stems from the financial crisis as well.
Douthat:
So to go on with the story: you worked at a think tank for a while after college and you went to Yale Law School. While in Yale Law, you wrote what ended up becoming a somewhat famous essay, by the standards of law review essays, about Amazon and antitrust. The argument there was in part a critique and a reaction against how antitrust policy and how antimonopoly policy had been done and thought about in American life since the 1970s and 1980s. Can you talk a little bit about what was the antitrust consensus of the Reagan to Clinton to Obama years? And what was the argument against that consensus?
Khan: Before the 1980s, there had been a whole set of antitrust laws that were broadly around protecting fair competition. Generally, there was a skepticism of unchecked concentration and a view, more or less, that the government should play a pretty assertive role in trying to prevent extreme consolidation, in trying to prevent monopolization, in trying to prevent monopoly abuse.
Starting as early as the ’40s and ’50s, there started to be a critique of that. Initially these scholars were pretty fringe, but especially once the Reagan administration came into power, a lot of these views ended up getting a lot of traction. The short of it was a view that the antitrust laws were incoherent and ineffective in promoting competition, and instead, they should be much more permissive in allowing consolidation and allowing monopoly.
And starting in the ’80s, we saw huge waves of consolidation. That meant that in industry after industry, where a few decades ago you had dozens of competitors, increasingly you just have a few. Sometimes the extent of this consolidation can be masked because if you go to a grocery store and you go to the laundry detergent aisle or the chip aisle or the candy aisle, you’ll see a lot of brands, but a lot of those brands are owned —
Douthat: You’ll see a lot of brands, just to be clear.
Khan: You’ll see a lot of brands. But they’re just controlled by two or three companies in market after market, whether laundry detergent or even areas like chips or candies or snacks. And so that extensive consolidation is the direct result of a policy pivot — a pretty radical policy pivot — that was made in the early ’80s and that was pretty much in place including through the Obama administration.
And look, no doubt we saw slight modifications and slight changes in emphasis, but especially when it came to policing mergers — also policing abuse of monopoly power — there was a huge presumption against the government intervening, again, because there was this idea that, more or less, markets will self-correct.
Douthat: I want you to play political pundit for a minute because I want us to talk about how some of these ideas actually entered into American politics and captured the imagination of people who were not economists, but who were voters and politicians and activists and others. I think it had a lot to do with the rise of Silicon Valley and the emergence of these new, large-scale formations of corporate power that just hadn’t been there before.
My sense of the story is that this is not at all a neat right-left story. You have, for a period of time, the Obama administration — while skeptical of consolidation in some ways, it was very friendly to Silicon Valley. You have Donald Trump running for president in 2016, not as an anti-monopolist, but as a more anti-corporate, “I’m going to be on the side of workers” Republican than we’d seen before. Trump doesn’t govern that way really in his first term, but certainly threaded through his administration, there’s this skepticism of Silicon Valley, in particular as a bastion of progressivism. So you have that skepticism.
You also have this really strong swing on the left, from my perspective, that seems to happen from the mid 2010s to the point when Joe Biden is elected, when suddenly Silicon Valley is seen as a threatening and dangerous and destabilizing force. And it becomes the focus in a lot of debate of some of these anti-monopolistic arguments that you’ve been offering. Why do you think that swing happened, as a political matter?
Khan: A few things happened to my mind. The 2016 election was a bit of a wake-up moment, I think especially for the Democratic Party, but also both sides, in terms of seeing very clearly how a handful of dominant platforms wielded enormous sway over their ability to shape public opinion, over their ability to decide what gets seen and heard in the 21st-century public sphere, and a recognition that these companies were not meaningfully checked by competition. Oftentimes it was just the whims or the idiosyncrasies of a single C.E.O. that could end up having massive public ramifications. So there was a reckoning with that concentration of power and what it would mean.
There was also a greater groundswell of reporting that was coming out about the other ways that these firms were abusing their platforms, including through things like surveilling kids, collecting all sorts of data on kids, and getting people addicted to social media. So the social costs — and especially the effects on children — ended up catalyzing more skepticism toward these firms as well. I think, on the politics, there was just a raw reckoning with the exercise of power that we’re seeing from these firms.
The third thing I would note is that a through line across these big tech companies is that they came to dominate key arteries of commerce and communications. They ended up becoming gatekeepers. That meant that you had all sorts of users that were dependent on them, but you also had businesses — major Fortune 500 businesses — that all of a sudden were also suddenly dependent on the whims of a Google or an Amazon and could see how a single tweak of the algorithm could end up being devastating.
So I think there was actually a broader political coalition that was able to bring attention to the power of these firms and a broader set of political interests that were being harmed.
Douthat: But there was also, I think, a tension on the Democratic side. On the Republican side, especially during the Covid era, the right became intensely focused on the idea that these companies had outsized power to police the boundaries of speech, and the way they were going to police it — because Silicon Valley leaned progressive — was going to be left wing and was going to be hostile to the right.
On the liberal side, it seemed like there was a mixed feeling. There were people who took what I would take to be your view, and would say: OK, the things that conservatives are upset about with these platforms are themselves the result of monopolistic power, so we should talk to conservatives and create a united front around some of these issues. But then there were also plenty of liberals and Democrats who were like: Yes, these are incredibly powerful companies that have the capacity to police speech on the internet, and we should tell them to do it — we should effectively create public-private partnerships to fight back against disinformation and misinformation, because that is the great threat of our age.
Am I describing a tension that you see in Democratic politics? Because it really seemed like there were lots of Democrats who around 2020-2021 were perfectly happy to have Facebook or Twitter exerting lots of power over politics, as long as they were doing it on the progressive side of things.
Khan: It’s fair to say that there were different views about how we should respond to this extreme concentration of power. There were people who thought it was the concentrated power itself that was the problem, because we shouldn’t want a handful of executives to get to make these calls in the first instance. There were others that thought maybe it’s inevitable that we’re going to see this consolidation, or maybe it’s just easier if we befriend them and get them to do our bidding instead.
Douthat: Do you think the anti-consolidation side won?
Khan: What do you mean by “won?”
Douthat: Well, there’s no permanent victories in politics, but which do you think was more powerful in the Biden administration? And we can talk about your work there.
So you became head of the F.T.C. under Joe Biden. How did you see your purpose in that role?
Khan: I took the helm in summer of 2021. I had a bipartisan vote. I had come to the job after years of writing about how I thought agencies like F.T.C. had been too hands-off and had been sometimes ineffective, and what we really needed was a reinvigorated approach to antitrust and consumer protection. I viewed that reinvigoration as being a core part of my mandate.
Practically, that took the form of a whole set of things. Partly it was making sure we were using the tools that Congress gave us. Stunningly, at the F.T.C., as well as at a set of other agencies, there are all sorts of areas of dormant authority — parts of the law, or sometimes even entire laws that enforcers decided they just didn’t think were wise to enforce or were no longer fashionable. So a core thing that we tried to do was just make sure we were doing what Congress had charged the agency with doing, which was enforcing, without fear or favor, the law prohibiting unfair methods of competition, for example. Or a law that was supposed to make it easier to penalize companies when they lied about their products being made in America.
It also meant, from my perspective, broadening the aperture of how the F.T.C. even figured out what problems existed in markets and in the economy. One of the criticisms that the F.T.C. had faced in the 2010s was that it had become myopic and was focusing on things like practices by ice skating teachers or church organists, and instead had been on the sidelines for some of the biggest incidents of corporate abuse in the 21st century, like the subprime mortgage crisis or for-profit schools that were preying on students. So making sure we were actually using our tools to address the biggest pain points for people, such as in health care markets or in tech markets, where people had become very dependent on these firms, or in areas like food and agriculture. Those were just two of the governing pivots that I really focused on.
Douthat: Talk a little bit about the partisan reaction here, because generally, as you would expect as a Democratic appointee, most of your fans were Democrats and most of your critics were Republicans. But there was both a quite vocal contingent of Democrats — particularly corporate and corporate-adjacent Democrats — who were pretty anti-Lina Khan. And then there was a group of populist Republicans, who tended to sometimes at least say nice things about you, including figures as diverse as, now the vice president of the United States, JD Vance; Matt Gaetz, Josh Hawley; and others.
What is your perspective on populist Republican sympathy for this agenda? To what extent is it real? To what extent did it matter to your work? What areas was it most notable in, if it was real?
Khan: So it absolutely seemed real in the sense of reflecting genuine concern about unchecked corporate power. It was most prominent in issues relating to technology markets, both for issues of how these companies are getting to call the shots about who gets heard and seen, but also around issues relating to data brokers and this vast surveillance apparatus that we’re seeing by these private, opaque companies. For people who are very averse to the government being able to surveil you, there was a recognition that allowing all of these data brokers to surveil us is as equally dangerous. So that was one big area of bipartisan concern.
The other big area was this issue of the hollowing out of parts of America that were resulting from independent businesses not being able to get a fair shake
So there were a whole set of issues where we saw strong bipartisan concern. One of the biggest areas — we actually saw it on the ground — was this issue of non-competes, these contractual provisions that basically limit your ability to freely go work for another company or go start your own business. When the F.T.C. proposed a rule that would ban non-competes, we got 25,000 comments from people all across the country. Some of these comments would say things like: I’m a lifelong Republican, a hard-core, free-market capitalist, but if the F.T.C. bans non-competes, it’ll be the best thing government has ever done.
There was just a recognition that there are all sorts of artificial ways that people’s liberty is being constrained because of unchecked corporate power, and if the F.T.C. is going to take that on, that’s going to be very popular and materially improve people’s lives.
Douthat: But there is still a fundamental, I think, philosophical disagreement between the scale of your view of what the F.T.C. should be up to, and any kind of conventional free-market vision. Maybe this is most manifest in the fact that you’ve lost a lot of court cases. Your record at the F.T.C., in terms of court decisions, was not one of constant victories.
Khan: That was a misperception. If you actually look at our court record compared to past administrations, it was at worst equal, and in some instances better. I mean, we won 95 percent of the cases we brought in the merger context alone.
One area where we saw this was in fact in taking on illegal mergers. We ended up finalizing new merger guidelines, which is basically the framework that the administration laid out for how we would assess whether a deal violated the antitrust law. Within a year of those being out, we had over a dozen court opinions that were validating and agreeing with core parts of those guidelines. So there is a whole set of areas where the law has advanced in the direction that we were pushing in. And of course, I wish we’d had more time to continue doing that —
Douthat: Where does the misperception come from then?
Khan: Well, there was a very concerted, very well resourced effort to discredit the work of the F.T.C. and to create a lot of misperception about our successes, and we saw that in all sorts of ways. But was really disconnected from reality. We just saw a lot of hysteria, and that manifested in trying to convince people that the F.T.C. was losing, the F.T.C. was ineffective, but that was pretty divorced from reality and what was actually happening in court.
Douthat: OK, but the Biden administration did lose — well, Kamala Harris lost the election. Donald Trump won.
Before we get to the second Trump administration’s approach to antitrust, I’m curious again about the politics of this kind of effort. The Biden administration did a lot of things — the antitrust, antimonopoly stuff, the fight against Silicon Valley was not the only thing it did, but it was one of the big ones — and obviously that didn’t translate into political success. Why not?
Khan: The antitrust component was a small part of the whole administration. A lot of what we did is still coming into effect. Some of the rules that we finalized, including a rule that would require that companies make it as easy to cancel a subscription as it is to sign up, and a rule that prohibits firms from including junk fees, so that once you get to the checkout, there are all these inflated fees that you don’t really know what you’re paying for — all of these are material ways that we are improving people’s lives. In some instances, there were delays with that. In other instances, I think there was a lack of full awareness of what some of these efforts were, and there are different reasons for that. In other instances, there were broader issues relating to people’s frustration with high costs and whether they felt like people were really speaking to that experience.
I mean, look, I’m not some type of electoral strategist, but what I can say from when I would go out and meet with people across the country is there was a lot of frustration. There was a lot of disillusionment. There was appreciation that somebody from D.C. had come to hear about what challenges that were facing, but a sense of pessimism that government would actually do the right thing if it would require standing up to powerful corporations. I mean, we’re up against a multi-decade drift away from using the levers of government and law enforcement to stand up for working people when it means taking on powerful corporations, and I think people are still very skeptical. But there was a lot of popularity —
Douthat: Be an electoral strategist for a minute. Because the Democratic Party is in the wilderness a bit at the moment — it lost the last election. Do you think there’s a political narrative out here — out of your work and out of your arguments and others like it — that’s waiting to be claimed? If you got a call from the future Democratic nominee for president in 2028, would you say: Look, there’s a story here that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris didn’t really tell, even though they were doing these things, that should be the centerpiece of the Democratic argument going forward.
Khan: Well, I would say two things. One is, as a law enforcer, you are figuring out, if there is a harmful practice, who is doing it. You’re filing a lawsuit against a company. And one thing that really resonated with people was an awareness and a recognition that these abusive practices are not just happening, they’re not like the weather — somebody is doing them. There is a corporation that is breaking the law in ways that is making their life worse.
I think sometimes we see a reluctance to be so pointed and to explain who is pursuing these practices in ways that are making it more expensive for people at the grocery store, making it harder for people to get affordable health care, making it harder for people to get affordable housing. There can just be a reluctance to name the abuser in some of these instances, in ways that can make people question: What is your narrative? What is your explanation for why my life isn’t better? And if you get into power, what are you going to do about it?
Douthat: Right. Let’s come back to that in one second.
Last question related directly to politics: What is the Trump administration’s approach to antitrust? It seems like there are some ideas inherited from your time at the F.T.C. that still find support. There are some that have been rejected. It also seems — like many things with the Trump administration — uncertain, a mixed bag. Things change from week to week. But what’s your take on Trump 2.0 antitrust so far?
Khan: I would say overall it’s a mixed bag. There is some continuity. There are core initiatives that we had set in motion that are still underway. They’ve kept the merger guidelines in place, for example. The cases that we pursued against the big tech companies, including Amazon and Facebook and Google — those, so far, are still on track. The administration is pursuing those despite some lobbying efforts.
Personally I am also still waiting to see, especially at the F.T.C., whether the zeal that we see on some of these more conservative grievance issues is also going to be extending to some of the day-to-day challenges that people are facing, like in health care or food and agriculture. I also worry, as we see in other parts of the administration, that the law could be weaponized to reward friends and punish enemies. I think we are seeing a real backsliding when it comes to the dismantling of huge parts of the government. On the one hand, we hear this administration still wants to be tough on big tech, but they’ve dismantled the C.F.P.B. — the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which had a whole set of investigations underway into big tech’s incursion into payment platforms.
So it seems like we’re seeing a lot of rhetoric, but if ultimately you are serious about governing in ways that’s checking monopoly power, you need a government. You need a functioning government. And so many of the efforts that we’re seeing in the direction of weakening and enfeebling the government are going to make that much more difficult — there’s a basic contradiction there.
Douthat: My sense is that, on the one hand, there’s a strong impulse, especially among younger conservatives who came of age in the late 2010s and had this profoundly negative reaction to their sense of what corporate power wanted to do, basically, on cultural issues, especially, in the late 2010s — out of that you have this strong interest in ideas, like the ones you’ve referenced, about bigness, generally, as a threat to individual liberty. And there’s an F.T.C. commissioner named Mark Meador, who wrote a long paper stringently attacking libertarian supporters of big business for ignoring big business’s threat to individual freedom and personal liberty. So there is a very potent philosophical strain.
At the same time, the main thing that I’ve seen Mark Meador say about you, Lina Khan, is there was a Twitter — excuse me, an X back-and-forth about the Trump-era F.T.C. backing away from a PepsiCo case, where there’s this strong philosophical overlap. But then Meador’s on Twitter saying that we’re backing away from this because Lina Khan’s F.T.C. overreached disastrously in all these ways.
Do you think there’s a strong incentive for the Trump F.T.C. to rhetorically distance itself from you, even when it has philosophical positions in common with you?
Khan: Well, I think what we have seen is a whole set of attacks on them in terms of them continuing to do too much of what we have been doing. So it wouldn’t surprise me if they felt like they had to appease some of those masters — including by potentially backtracking on meritorious cases.
In the case against Pepsi, we found after a two-year investigation that Pepsi was systematically discriminating against small and independent retailers in ways that are leaving communities much more worse off when it comes to access to affordable food and having real options in terms of independent grocery. This is something that would materially improve people’s lives, and for them to backtrack on that and dismiss the case is pretty troubling.
Douthat: But you think that’s about politics.
Khan: I can’t say —
Douthat: You don’t want to speculate?
Khan: They fired the Democratic commissioners who would have been at the F.T.C. and would have had some insight into what some of that decision making would be, which pretty disturbing as well, so I can’t speculate.
But I will say, embedded in the F.T.C.’s DNA is: If you are doing your job honestly and with integrity, you will probably upset some powerful interests. If you are charged with going up against illegal monopolies — monopolies tend to have a lot of political power, and if you don’t have the backbone and the spine to stand strong in the face of that pushback, I think that’s going to lead to some pretty bad outcomes for people. And a lot of talk, but no follow-through.
Douthat: Let’s come to a final act in the conversation and go back to where we started and talk about the economic problems in American life that the antitrust, antimonopoly movement wants to solve. In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, you’ve had a really interesting argument between liberals. There’s been a really stark division between people who want to organize liberal thinking around antimonopoly, anti-corporate power thinking, and people, like my colleague Ezra Klein, who have been arguing basically that the Democratic Party doesn’t have a strategy for dealing with the intense thicket of regulatory obstacles to building things and homes and factories in America.
I don’t think people on my colleague’s side of the debate would necessarily even disagree that we need more regulation and more scrutiny of corporations in some areas. But I think their view is that there are all of these impediments to economic flourishing that have nothing to do with the size and scale of big corporations, and have everything to do with how government operates and how it puts obstacles in the way of growth and development.
So that’s ended up being the key argument right now inside the liberal and Democratic tent. Do you think that these are actually ideas that can work together, that in fact the Democratic Party should be anti-monopolist, but also pro-growth in all these other ways that involve taking on problems and government power? Or do you think that there’s this fundamental tension, that this is an actual fork in the road for the Democratic Party?
Khan: A core part of a monopolist playbook is to create artificial scarcity and to actually serve as that bottleneck. So I think taking on those types of corporate bottlenecks, taking on those monopolies is absolutely in service of creating more growth.
On the issue of regulations and the extent to which they’re stifling that growth, I would say it can be pretty dangerous to talk about regulations as a monolith. There are different types of regulations. There can absolutely be regulations that are creating a lot of complexity and a lot of bureaucracy and, perversely, oftentimes benefit big business at the expense of small business, because it’s the bigger firms that are better equipped to navigate.
At the F.T.C., one of the legacies of the Reagan administration that we were dealing with was a lot of internal red tape and internal bureaucracy that had been created to try to handicap and enfeeble the agency that we had to take on and strip away. So we ended up looking at the law, saying: A lot of these procedures are not even required in what Congress said. The F.T.C. just made it up to handicap itself — let’s streamline those. And we ended up being able to push through some of these rules — on subscription traps, on fake reviews, on junk fees — in under two years.
Look, we need to talk in a market-by-market way, but if you are offering a diagnosis that is also suspiciously quiet about the role of corporate power, I think that should raise some questions as well.
Douthat: I guess. But couldn’t the counterargument be that if you’re raising a diagnosis that seems to always be saying: Look at this really narrow, specific thing, like junk fees that show up on hotels.com or wherever else that you don’t expect — those are pretty annoying, but in the end, they’re not nearly as big a deal to most Americans as housing prices.
But I think in general, it’s very, very clear, just from living in the United States of America and knowing people in lots of different places, that blue states and liberal states have, to some degree, manufactured scarcity in housing through heavy, heavy regulation, and red states have not. Isn’t this in a way just going to be a bigger deal for most people than junk fees at the end of a hotel booking or something like that? Not that junk fees are good, but if you’re talking about what liberals should be most concerned about.
Khan: Sure. I mean, I would just say the antimonopoly agenda is more than junk fees. [Chuckles.]
Douthat: Yes. No, I —
Khan: It sits upstream from so much, including whether people can get access to inhalers for $35 as opposed to hundreds of dollars.
On the issue of housing, I think you really need to study specific markets. I just read a very close study of the Dallas housing market.
Douthat: I also read that study, yes.
Khan: It looked at whether significant zoning liberalization actually led to more affordable housing. And that analysis said: No, actually it didn’t.
On this issue of “is antimonopoly just about small things?” — it really contrasts with my experience of being at the F.T.C. and seeing on the ground the enormous support for the F.T.C. taking on things like illegal repair restrictions, which you could say: Oh, that’s a minor thing, whether you can freely repair your own tractor or your own machine. This really implicates people’s own sense of autonomy and agency and gets to this broader issue of, do people feel like they’re masters of their own lives? Or do they feel like increasingly core questions about their day-to-day life are dependent on the whims of these distant giants?
That whole set of issues is deeply tied to questions of market structure. And whether independent businesses can thrive, whether you as a worker can freely go take a job somewhere else or go start your own business, and yes, even things like whether you have to stay on hold for three hours to talk to a customer service representative to cancel your subscription — all of those things deeply affect and shape your experience of America in a day-to-day life and really affect whether you feel free or not.
Douthat: Alright. Well, let’s end with the internet and Silicon Valley and Meta, which used to be called Facebook. As you mentioned, that’s one of the antitrust cases that the Trump administration has continued. It’s made the case in court that Mark Zuckerberg’s company is a social media monopoly power that overstepped in acquiring WhatsApp and Instagram, and should be broken up in some way. This is based on actions the company took about a decade ago, and I think it’s a good distillation in a way to ask: if Meta were actually broken up, what would it solve for the average American internet user? What would be the benefit — material, political, or social?
Khan: The case is arguing that Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal. That they were defensive, that Facebook itself was not organically able to compete and thrive in the mobile market, so then it went out and bought these companies that were native to mobile, that were doing really well, that users really liked, and brought them in-house. And as a result, people have been deprived of more options.
It has also meant that, in some instances, these services have been degraded. WhatsApp, for example, famously had provided users more privacy. You could pay as little as $1, and WhatsApp would not be monetizing your data or selling personal information about you. Once WhatsApp was bought internal to Facebook — Facebook’s model is very different. It is all about monetizing your user, so there were real costs in terms of privacy.
We don’t know yet what remedy the F.T.C. is ultimately going to seek. In initial filings, they did indicate strongly that the breakup of Facebook, including the divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp, would be the right remedy — that people would then have more options, that these firms would be able to make more independent choices and be able to fill more gaps in terms of what consumers really want.
I think the other big question is: What does a forward-looking remedy look like? Because you’re right, these acquisitions were done over a decade ago —
Douthat: And they were done, I should stress, at a period when, from the point of view of the average person, Facebook looked more powerful than it does now. To me as an internet user, it seems like the story of the internet, while it is dominated by giants in various ways, is also a story of churn, rise, decline and competition. And if you told me in 2014 or 2015 you should think about Facebook as a monopoly — that would seem more persuasive to me than it does right now.
Khan: Well, it’s an interesting question as we think about A.I. and what the future of these artificial intelligence markets are going to look like.
Douthat: Yes.
Khan: Because you do have significant overlap between the firms that were dominant in the Web 2.0 era and these hyperscalers that are going to potentially be positioned to dominate some of the key inputs for artificial intelligence. Meta is a player. They have some of these more open models.
One thing we’re seeing play out in the Google litigation right now — Google has been found to be a monopoly, both in online search markets, as well as digital ad markets — and one key question that judges are facing is: What does a forward-looking remedy look like? The Justice Department, both under the last administration and this administration, has made some arguments around what it would look like to make sure that Google is not able to reap the rewards of its illegal behavior in A.I. markets.
That’s a core tenant as you’re thinking about antitrust remedies. You want to stop the illegal behavior, you want to stop its recurrence, but you also want to deny the lawbreaker the fruit of its lawbreaking. And that could mean in these more old school markets, or it could mean in these forward-looking markets. So we’re going to have to wait to see how that plays out.
Douthat: OK. But as someone who is both concerned about the future of A.I./ and concerned about the impact of the internet on society, this is a case where I look at the arguments you’re making and I think to myself: even where they’re persuasive, they don’t necessarily seem to prioritize the things that I’m most worried about.
If you say to me: OK, we want Facebook to spin off WhatsApp and Instagram — or whatever remedy you might seek — and I am concerned about the impact that the internet has on my children, I’m not going to say to myself: Ah, thank God we’ve finally gotten more competition in the social media app space. That’s great. That’s what I need. I need 17 TikToks and not just one — that’s not my reaction. In the same way with the age of A.I., there’s a way in which your remedy seems orthogonal to the things I’m most worried about.
But I want to give you a chance to say that maybe I’m wrong, and that maybe antitrust and antimonopoly is useful for thinking about the social harms of the internet or the potential for a dangerous breakneck race toward super intelligence. Do you think it is relevant to these concerns?
Khan: Well, one of the things that came out through the Facebook trial was this issue of Instagram showing a shocking number of individuals it had categorized as groomers, and recommending to them their profiles of young people.
Douthat: Right.
Khan: And so we can ask: Why was this? Is this related to the fact that Facebook is not having to compete?
I do think we’ve seen situations where firms not being checked by competition on issues like, “Are you making your services safe for kids?” can all be worsened by the issue of monopoly power. There are absolutely social harms that are less related to this issue of monopoly power and whether you do or don’t have competition. I think we need certain background rules, including on things like, what kinds of data can firms collect on you? What can they do with that data?
Some of this implicated the F.T.C.’s consumer protection work, where for decades the primary paradigm for how to think about people’s privacy had been this idea of notice and consent, that firms could just show you lengthy terms of service, and as long as they could point to the fine print, they could basically get away with doing it. We ended up instead drawing some bright lines and saying there are certain types of sensitive data, like your health data, your precise geolocation data, your browsing data, where the default cannot be that their firms can just collect and disseminate this data, including with companies in foreign jurisdictions. So these types of background rules are absolutely needed for ultimately making sure that these digital markets are serving us as a society.
Douthat: OK. I’m going to make one last try, though, to force you to be more sweeping in your analysis. So we started out with the idea of big corporations as a potential threat — again, not just to consumer welfare, but to the way we live together in democracy itself. And we’re ending with my personal concerns, but they’re widely shared concerns about the way that Silicon Valley, in particular its technologies are reshaping the nature of human life, the nature of human interaction, the nature of childhood, and then, potentially with A.I., all kinds of things beyond that.
My sense throughout this interview is that you don’t want to separate the political and the economic for good reason. You ran the F.T.C. The F.T.C. has an economic mandate, in terms of competition and so on. But it seems to me that you could push further on the political side of the argument and say: Look, there is a case for breaking up concentrations of power — even if it’s bad for the economy — if it’s good for society and good for democratic flourishing. And that could apply to Silicon Valley, that we want weaker tech giants just for the sake of political goods, and not economic ones. Do you think that’s true?
Khan: It’s absolutely true that policymakers could decide that. The existing antitrust and antimonopoly laws don’t allow law enforcers to use their own social conception of the public good to use the law in those directions, which is maybe why you’re sensing a bit of reluctance on my part to say, yes, antitrust can do that. But it’s absolutely true —
Douthat: Not just the laws that we have on the books now. I don’t want to impute too much to you, but you are the would-be leader of what is an influential movement in American life — again, that has support, in distinctive ways, on both the left and the right.
So I’m just curious — not just for thoughts on what the F.T.C. can do under Donald Trump or under President Bernie Sanders or any other Democratic president, but how should a movement worried about corporate power think about the internet and Silicon Valley going forward? That’s all.
Khan: If you outsource your policy prescriptions to just a certain set of market prescriptions, I think that’s dangerous and you lose sight of what are some of the broader public values and the social good that we care about. So I absolutely think we need to be using our tools of government to make sure that the future trajectory of some of these technologies is actually going to be serving us as a public, even if it’s not checking all the boxes for what some neoclassical economist would want.
Douthat: Excellent. So I’ve talked Lina Khan into banning the internet — not really. But on that note, Lina, thank you so much for joining me.
Khan: Thanks so much for having me.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “Interesting Times” was produced by Katherine Sullivan, Elisa Gutierrez, Andrea Betanzos and Sophia Alvarez Boyd. It was edited by Jordana Hochman. Mixing and engineering by Pat McCusker. Cinematography by Marina King. Video editing by Dani Dillon. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker and Aman Sahota. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair and Will Peischel. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Video directed by Jonah M. Kessel. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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