54 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
that it was fining Google $2.7 billion
for antitrust violations, accusing the
company, in its shopping services, of
ranking its own products higher in its
search results than those of its com-
petitors. Lynn posted a statement on
Open Markets’ Web site calling on
F.T.C. and Justice Department officials
to follow Europe’s lead. Over two de-
cades, Google and Eric Schmidt had
provided some twenty million dollars
in funding to New America, and
Schmidt had served on New Ameri-
ca’s board. Two days after the Web post,
New America’s C.E.O., Anne-Marie
Slaughter, told Lynn that Open Mar-
kets could no longer be affiliated with
the think tank. Lynn thinks that his
group’s ejection was in direct response
to pressure from Schmidt, but Slaugh-
ter told me that Lynn and Open Mar-
kets had been critical of Google for
years. “This was an internal matter with
Barry about playing by our rules and
communicating with colleagues appro-
priately, and it was never about the
work,” she said. Schmidt said that Lynn’s
speculation that he was involved was
false and that he had always liked the
fact that New America published things
he disagreed with.
Lynn reëstablished Open Markets
as an independent nonprofit, moving
with Khan and the rest of the staff
to a co-working space nearby. In the
spring of 2018, Khan received an e-mail
from Rohit Chopra, a commissioner
at the F.T.C., asking her to act as his
legal adviser. In 2010, Chopra joined
the newly created Consumer Finan-
cial Protection Bureau, where he worked
under Warren, serving as the agency’s
assistant director and student-loan om-
budsman and becoming an outspo-
ken critic of the student-loan indus-
try. Like many others who worked at
the C.F.P.B. in its early days, Chopra
had come to see the influence of cor-
porations on regulation and public pol-
icy as increasingly corrupt. The F.T.C.,
in Chopra’s view, was part of the prob-
lem: its commissioners generally de-
ferred to large corporations, and, even
when the agency confronted compa-
nies over rule violations, it tended to
resolve the claims through settlements
and empty promises from the compa-
nies that they would change their be-
havior. Individual executives were al-
most never held accountable; most
claims were resolved by fining the com-
panies, and the fines were paid by share-
holders. When President Trump ap-
pointed Chopra to one of the two seats
reserved for the minority party on the
five-person commission, he accepted
the job knowing that his inf luence
would be limited. Still, he arrived de-
termined to push the agency to rethink
its role in the economy. “I had a strong
view that the F.T.C. was a backwater
and essentially a failed agency,” Chopra
told me.
Soon after he arrived, he issued a
memo on the subject of “repeat offend-
ers,” companies that violated agree-
ments they had made with their reg-
ulators multiple times. One of the most
flagrant examples was Facebook, which,
in 2011, had reached a settlement with
the F.T.C. over user-privacy violations.
Facebook promised to obtain its users’
consent before sharing their data with
outside companies. A few years later,
a whistle-blower revealed that the data-
analytics firm Cambridge Analytica,
which counted Robert Mercer as a key
investor, a Trump supporter, and a
hedge-fund billionaire, had accessed
millions of Facebook user profiles and
used them to try to disseminate polit-
ical propaganda and influence voting
decisions. “F.T.C. orders are not sug-
gestions,” Chopra wrote. “Maintain-
ing our credibility as public interest
law enforcers requires that order vio-lations be remedied and, when appro-
priate, penalized.” The memo was an
attack on the work of the agency’s staff
in the previous years. “I knew that it
would ruffle feathers, which always is
important when you’re trying to change
agencies that have become stagnant,”
Chopra told me.
Khan worked with Chopra at the
commission for about three months.
They published several research reports,
including an influential law-review ar-ticle recommending that the F.T.C. re-
imagine the way it approaches antitrust
enforcement by focussing on design-
ing new rules to address violations
rather than on costly and risky litiga-
tion. Chopra told me that Khan had
shaped the way he thinks about big
technology firms’ influence over com-
merce and public opinion. “Her work
was very meaningful in terms of how
we start to think about some of these
problems,” he said. “Both as threats to
families and the economy and as con-
tributors to social division and under-
mining national security.”
In the fall of 2018, Khan started
a teaching fellowship at Columbia
Law School, where Tim Wu was a pro-
fessor. In November, the Democrats
won control of the House of Represen-
tatives, and, the following June, the
House Judiciary Subcommittee on An-
titrust opened an investigation into Am-
azon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. The
investigation was led by David Cicil-
line’s antitrust subcommittee, but it had
strong support from Republicans, in-
cluding F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., from
Wisconsin, one of the authors of the
Patriot Act. Both the Democrats and
the Republicans found themselves di-
vided between more pro-corporate and
more populist factions, with some Dem-
ocrats expressing concern that tech com-
panies were stifling small businesses and
keeping wages from rising, and some
Republicans venting angrily about con-
servative views being censored on social-
media platforms. One congressional
staffer involved in the investigation com-
plained that several Republicans “only
cared about the hyper-partisan messag-
ing apps that are important to Trump
supporters.”
Khan was one of the first people
whom Cicilline and his chief legal
counsel on the Judiciary Subcommit-
tee, Slade Bond, recruited. “She’s in-
credibly thoughtful, brilliant, and a real
scholar in terms of antitrust,” Cicilline
said. He told her, “This investigation
will be an opportunity to take all that
experience and help Congress develop
a road map to fix this problem.”
Khan was splitting her time be-
tween Dallas, where her husband was
completing a medical fellowship, and
New York City. She immediately
agreed to join the subcommittee. She