• by Wendy Davis , March 9, 2021

President Joe Biden reportedly is planning to tap Columbia Law professor and antitrust expert Lina Khan to serve on the Federal Trade Commission.

If appointed, Khan would replace Rohit Chopra, who is expected to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

In 2017, while still a law student, Khan authored the influential Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.”

She argued in the piece that the government's antitrust policies should aim to preserve a “competitive process and market structure,” as opposed to merely examining whether a company's practices harm consumers in the short term.

"Internet platforms mediate a large and growing share of our commerce and communications. Yet evidence shows that competition in platform markets is flagging, with sectors coalescing around one or two giants,” she wrote. “The titan in e-commerce is Amazon -- a company that has built its dominance through aggressively pursuing growth at the expense of profits and that has integrated across many related lines of business. As a result, the company has positioned itself at the center of Internet commerce and serves as essential infrastructure for a host of other businesses that now depend on it.”

She also was among the counsel to the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, which criticized large tech companies in a report issued last year.

News of Khan's possible appointment, first reported by Politico, comes just days after the White House tapped another critic of Big Tech, Columbia Law professor Tim Wu, to serve as an economic adviser.