48 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
PROFILES
THE ENFORCER
Lina Khan’s battle to rein in Big Tech.BY SHEELAHKOLHATKAR
I
n the spring of 2011, a recent Wil-
liams College graduate named Lina
Khan interviewed for a job at the
Open Markets Program, in Washing-
ton, D.C. Open Markets, which was
part of the New America think tank,
was dedicated to the study of monop-
olies and the ways in which concentra-
tion in the American economy was sup-
pressing innovation, depressing wages,
and fuelling inequality. The program
had been founded the previous year by
Barry Lynn, who believed that monop-
olies posed a threat to democracy, and
that policymakers and much of the pub-
lic were blind to this threat. Unlike the
practice at other think tanks, which pub-
lish research reports and white papers,
Lynn, a former reporter and editor, dis-
seminated the program’s findings di-
rectly to the public, through newspaper
and magazine articles.
The study of antitrust law was far
from fashionable; since the nineteen-
eighties, the field had been dominated
by a world view that favored corporate
conglomeration, which was acceptable,
mainstream experts believed, as long as
consumer prices didn’t rise. Lynn was
seeking a researcher without any formal
economics training, who would come to
the subject with fresh eyes. Khan had
studied the 2008 financial crisis and was
interested in the effects of power dis-
parities in the economy. She checked
out Lynn’s book, “Cornered: The New
Monopoly Capitalism and the Econom-
ics of Destruction,” from the library and
skimmed it the night before her inter-
view. “When she walked in that door,
she had no idea what this entailed or
what she would become,” Lynn told me.
“She was just a fantastically smart per-
son who was very curious.”
During the interview, Lynn recalled,
he asked Khan, “Do you ever get angry?
Does anything make you outraged?”
She replied, “No, not really.” Lynn said,
“I think you’ll become angry while
you’re doing this work. There will
be things that you discover here that
will outrage you.” Khan took the job.
Open Markets studied industries
ranging from banking to agriculture. In
case after case, Lynn found, the number
of companies in each market had been
reduced to a few big entities that had
bought up their competitors, giving them
a disproportionate amount of power.
Consumers had the impression of vast
choices among brands, but this was often
misleading: many of the biggest furni-
ture stores were owned by one company;
a large percentage of the dozens of laun-
dry detergents in most supermarkets were
made by two corporations. After consol-
idation, it became easier for furniture
sellers and detergent manufacturers to
raise prices, compromise the quality of
their products, or treat employees poorly,
because consumers and workers had few
other places to go. It also became much
more difficult for entrepreneurs to break
into the marketplace, because compet-
ing with these giants was almost impos-
sible. As huge companies became even
bigger, much of the American middle
class struggled with stagnant wages. In
Lynn’s view, the issues were connected.
Khan began researching book pub-
lishing. “There was a sense that this in-
dustry was in crisis,” she recalled. Pub-
lishers had come under pressure, first
from chain stores like Barnes & Noble,
and then from Amazon, which sold
electronic books by pricing them at a
loss, in order to encourage consumers
to buy its Kindle e-book readers. Am-
azon eventually controlled more than
seventy per cent of the e-book market,
a dominance that gave it the ability to
force publishers to accept its terms, un-
dermining the business model they had
long used to subsidize the creation of a
wide variety of books. When publish-
ers tried to band together to fight Am-
azon, the Justice Department sued them,
fearing that their action would increasethe retail price of e-books. The publish-
ers saw Amazon’s power as potentially
leading to a decline in the free exchange
of ideas and as a crisis for democracy.
Increasingly, so did Khan. Her work
helped provide the basis for a piece that
Lynn published in Harper’s, in Febru-
ary, 2012, called “Killing the Competi-
tion.” Today, he wrote, “a single private
company has captured the ability to dic-
tate terms to the people who publish
our books, and hence to the people who
write and read our books.”
Khan told me that she started to see
the world differently. “It’s incredible,
once you start studying industry struc-
ture and see how much consolidation
there has been across industries—in air-
lines, contact-lens solution, funeral cas-
kets,” she said. “Every nook and cranny
of our economy has consolidated. I was
discovering this new world.” At one
point, she investigated the candy mar-
ket, identifying nearly forty brands in
her local store that were made by Her-
shey, Mars, or Nestlé. In another proj-
ect, about the raising of poultry, she
found that most farmers had to pur-
chase chicks and feed from the giant
poultry processor that bought their full-
grown chickens, which, because it had
no local competitors, could dictate the
price it paid for them.
Lynn and Khan couldn’t seem to get
lawmakers to pay attention. “It defi-
nitely felt like we were on the margins
of the policy conversation,” Khan said.
One afternoon, she looked up from an
article she was reading on her computer.
Lynn recalls her saying, “Barry, I think
I’m starting to feel angry.”
On June 15, 2021, Khan was sworn in
as the chair of the Federal Trade Com-
mission, the agency responsible for con-
sumer protection and for enforcing the
branch of law that regulates monopo-
lies. At the age of thirty-two, she is the
youngest person ever to head the F.T.C.
Matt Stoller, the director of research at