50 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
the anti-monopoly think tank the Amer-
ican Economic Liberties Project, de-
scribed Khan’s ascent as “earth-shatter-
ing.” The appointment represents the
triumph of ideas advocated by people
like Khan and Lynn that had been sup-
pressed or ignored for decades. “She un-
derstands profoundly what monopoly
power means for workers and for con-
sumers and for innovation,” said David
Cicilline, a Democratic congressman
from Rhode Island and the chair of the
House Committee on the Judiciary’s
Subcommittee on Antitrust,
Commercial, and Adminis-
trative Law. “She will use
the full power of the F.T.C.
to promote competition,
which I think is good for
our economy, good for work-
ers, and good for consum-
ers and businesses.”
After years spent pub-
lishing research about how
a more just world could be
achieved through a sweeping reimag-
ining of anti-monopoly laws, Khan now
has a much more difficult task: testing
her theories—in an arena of lobbyists,
partisan division, and the federal court
system—as one of the most powerful
regulators of American business. “There’s
no doubt that the latitude one has as a
scholar, critiquing certain approaches,
is very different from being in the po-
sition of actually executing,” Khan told
me. But she added that she intends to
steer the agency to choose consequen-
tial cases, with less emphasis on the out-
comes, and to generally be more pro-
active. “Even in cases where you’re not
going to have a slam-dunk theory or a
slam-dunk case, or there’s risk involved,
what do you do?” she said. “Do you turn
away? Or do you think that these are
moments when we need to stand strong
and move forward? I think for those
types of questions we’re certainly at a
moment where we take the latter path.
“There’s a growing recognition that
the way our economy has been struc-
tured has not always been to serve peo-
ple,” Khan went on. “Frankly, I think this
is a generational issue as well.” She noted
that coming of age during the financial
crisis had helped people understand that
the way the economy functions is not
just the result of metaphysical forces. “It’s
very concrete policy and legal choices
that are made, that determine these out-
comes,” she said. “This is a really historic
moment, and we’re trying to do every-
thing we can to meet it.”A
mazon taught a generation of
consumers that they could order
anything online, from packs of mints
to swimming pools, and expect it to be
delivered almost overnight. According
to some estimates, the company con-
trols close to fifty per cent of all e-com-
merce retail sales in the U.S. and occu-
pies roughly two hundred
and twenty-eight million
square feet of warehouse
space. It makes movies and
publishes books; delivers
groceries; provides home-
security systems and the
cloud-computing services
that many other companies
rely on. Amazon’s founder,
Jeff Bezos, wants to colo-
nize the moon. During the
Presidency of Barack Obama, Ama-
zon’s relentless expansion was largely
encouraged by the government. The
country was emerging from a devastat-
ing recession, and Obama saw entre-
preneurs like Bezos as sources of inno-
vation and jobs. In 2013, in a speech
given at an Amazon warehouse in Chat-
tanooga, Tennessee, Obama described
the company’s role in bolstering the fi-
nancial security of the middle class and
creating stable, well-paying work. He
spoke with near-awe of how, during
the previous Christmas rush, Amazon
had sold more than three hundred items
per second. Obama was also close with
Eric Schmidt, the former executive
chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent
company. An analysis by the Intercept
found that employees and lobbyists
from Alphabet visited the White House
more than those from any other com-
pany, and White House staff turned to
Google technologists to troubleshoot
the Affordable Care Act Web site and
other projects. Between 2010 and 2016,
Amazon, Google, and other tech gi-
ants bought up hundreds of competi-
tors, and the government, for the most
part, did not object. The analysis also
found that nearly two hundred and fifty
people moved between government po-
sitions and companies controlled by
Schmidt, law and lobbying firms thatdid work for Alphabet, or Alphabet
itself. When Obama left office, many
of his top aides took jobs at tech com-
panies: Jay Carney, Obama’s former
press secretary, joined Amazon; David
Plouffe, his campaign manager, and
Tony West, a high-ranking official at
the Department of Justice, joined Uber;
and Lisa Jackson, the former head of
the Environmental Protection Agency,
went to Apple.
The ascent of Donald Trump spurred
activists across the political spectrum to
become interested in the new power of
tech companies, upending many tradi-
tional partisan differences. The role that
Facebook played in the 2016 election,
and the enormous influence that the
company had over the information that
people were seeing, was an electrifying
moment. In fact, many of the major
tech companies were accused of play-
ing a role in the conditions that led vot-
ers to choose Trump and his populist
message: Uber and Lyft, with their gig-
economy jobs, were blamed for under-
mining labor unions and the middle
class; Amazon had helped drive Main
Street businesses into bankruptcy; Face-
book was the site of Russian disinfor-
mation campaigns and a platform of
choice for figures from the far right;
Apple made most of its luxury devices
in factories in China, reaping enormous
profits while creating relatively few jobs
in the U.S.; Google, through its subsid-
iary YouTube, hosted hate speech.
As a result, antitrust policy, espe-
cially as it pertains to big technology
firms, has emerged as one of the stark-
est differences between the Biden Pres-
idency and the Obama one. Stacy Mitch-
ell, a co-director of the Institute for
Local Self-Reliance, an anti-monopoly
think tank, described the contrast as
“night and day.” Obama’s politics were
“very much in the center of the road,
in terms of the dominant thought
of the last several decades,” Mitchell
told me. She noted that evidence of
this world view could be seen early in
Obama’s tenure, when his Admini-
stration declined to break up the big
banks that had helped cause the 2008
financial crisis, and, instead, allowed
them to become even larger and more
powerful, while millions of people lost
their homes to foreclosure. “Because of
his identity as someone who was very