AT A CNN TOWN HALL meeting this April, Elizabeth
Warren fielded a question from an audience member.
The questioner, named Meghan, extolled the conve-
nience of Amazon and then asked Warren—who had
recently proposed a plan to cut online platforms down
to size—“How is breaking up Big Tech good for me?”
The candidate launched in. “A lot of these giant tech
companies, they actually run two businesses,” she said:
They run a platform that connects buyers and sellers,
and they compete on that platform as vendors them-
selves—while collecting near-omniscient data on their
rivals. Warren then described how Amazon might use
this intel to quash a hypothetical brand called Pet Pillows
after it starts to take off: “I know what we’ll do,” Warren
said, imagining the behemoth’s thoughts. “Let’s jump
in front of Pet Pillows and do ‘Amazon Pet Pillows’ andmove Pet Pillows from the front page.” (Amazon dis-
putes this characterization of its business practices.) In
the name of fair competition, Warren concluded, Ama-
zon’s two businesses had to be split up.
“Elizabeth Warren’s Really Simple Case for Breaking
Up Big Tech,” ran the headline of a story that night on
Vox. The article gave Warren props for being “crystal
clear on a topic that often feels abstract.” But if Warren
has become particularly lucid on the issue of antitrust
enforcement, she owes much of that clarity to a millen-
nial from Mamaroneck, New York, named Lina Khan.
In 2017, when she was a 27-year-old law student, Khan
wrote a paper for the Yale Law Journal called “Amazon’s
Antitrust Paradox.” The 24,000-word article offered a
careful anatomy of Amazon’s market power and called
for a wholesale reassessment of antitrust jurisprudence.ANTITRUST
Lina Khan
MAJORITY COUNSEL /
The US House Subcommittee
on Antitrust, Commercial, and
Administrative Law
Laying the foundation for
breaking up Big Tech.