progressive on a lot of other issues, I
don’t think people saw that very clearly,”
she said.
Through a series of appointments to
regulatory and legal positions, the Biden
Administration has indicated that it
wants to reshape the role that major
technology companies play in the econ-
omy and in our lives. On March 5th,
Biden named Tim Wu, a Columbia
Law School professor and an anti-
monopoly advocate who has argued that
Facebook should be broken up, to the
newly created position of head of com-
petition policy at the National Eco-
nomic Council, which advises the Pres-
ident on economic-policy matters. On
March 22nd, Biden nominated Khan
to her current role. And, in July, he se-
lected Jonathan Kanter to head the
antitrust division of the Department
of Justice. Kanter left the law firm Paul,
Weiss in 2020 because his work repre-
senting companies making antitrust
claims against Big Tech firms posed a
conflict for the firm’s work for Apple,
among others. Wu, Khan, Kanter, and
a handful of other anti-monopoly ad-
vocates have been referred to as mem-
bers of a “New Brandeis movement,”
after the Supreme Court Justice Louis
Brandeis, whose decisions limited the
power of big business. Because of Khan’s
youth, she has also been called the leader
of the “hipster antitrust” faction, but
this doesn’t capture the seriousness of
her intentions. On August 19th, she re-
filed an aggressive antitrust complaint
that the F.T.C. had initiated in 2020,
seeking to break up Facebook. In Sep-
tember, the agency published a report
analyzing hundreds of acquisitions
made by the biggest tech companies
which were never submitted for gov-
ernment review. Although the report
didn’t call for any specific action, it was
a sign that Khan intends to look far
deeper into Big Tech’s business than
her predecessors did.
T
he F.T.C.’s headquarters, in Wash-
ington, D.C., occupies a limestone
building from 1938 whose hulking pro-
portions were meant to convey the
steadiness of the federal government.
The lobby is lined with black-and-
white portraits of former F.T.C. chair-
men and commissioners, almost all de-
picting white men. The agency has
been under a work-from-home order
since March, 2020, but Khan goes in
whenever she can. (She lives in New
York City, where her husband, Shah
Ali, a cardiologist, works.) On a recent
afternoon, I visited her in her third-
floor office, where she was preparing
for a meeting with members of a for-
eign law-enforcement agency. “Com-
ing in, I was aware that this is poten-
tially a historic moment,” she said. “If
there are ventilator shortages after a
merger we approved—these are all
problems tied up in policy decisions.”
When I asked when she first became
aware of the concept of injustice, she
said, “Most kids are aware of bullies,
and of who has power and who doesn’t
have power.”
Khan, who has dark eyes, angular
features, and dark-brown hair that’s
often tied in a loose bun, was born in
London to parents from Pakistan.
When she was eleven, the family moved
to the U.S., where her father was a man-
agement consultant and her mother
worked at Thomson Reuters. They set-
tled in Mamaroneck, a suburb of NewYork City, where Khan and her two
brothers attended public school.
After working at Open Markets for
three years, Khan applied to law school
and to several journalism jobs. She was
accepted at Yale, and the Wall Street
Journal offered her a position as a re-
porter covering commodities, in part
because editors there had seen work she
had published for Open Markets on
the manipulation of commodities mar-
kets by firms such as Goldman Sachs.
“It was a real ‘choose the path’ moment,”
Khan told me. She chose Yale, which
has been home to some of the most
prominent antitrust legal scholars in
the country, albeit ones who subscribe
to a view that Khan finds outdated.
In his compact yet far-reaching book
“The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in
the New Gilded Age,” Wu traces the
history of the idea that the govern-
ment should restrain companies that
become extremely powerful. He de-
scribes the more than two thousand
manufacturing mergers that occurred
between 1895 and 1904 as a “monopo-
lization movement,” when business“Isn’t it nice to exchange good old-fashioned germs again?”