Name: FTC Chair Lina Khan’s Exit Interview: Challenging AI, Big Tech and More | WSJ
Uploaded: 2025-01-15T08:49:53.000Z
Duration: 9 min 1 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Lina Khan, thank you so much for joining us.

Okay, so you're winding up your final days as chair of the Federal Trade Commission.

Technology companies, obviously, have grown enormously big in the past few years.

Do you think that you've been able to adjust the monopoly powers of these companies in a way that does protect Americans or limit these companies' scope?

The Justice Department got an important win last year with a court holding that Google had violated the antitrust laws.

We have a Facebook case that's going to trial this spring, a big monopolization lawsuit against Amazon that's going to trial in fall of 2026.

But certainly what we heard from, you know, those in Silicon Valley and executives was that there was greater awareness that there was now a cop on the beat.

Maybe it's completely a coincidence or maybe not, but people tied to those companies have been pouring money into the inauguration of President Trump.

Do you think there might be any expectation from these companies that they might get a better shake out of a future FTC and that might be why they're trying to cozy up to incoming President Trump?

I can't speak to what anybody's specific intentions are, but it's true that the FTC has received resounding wins in court.

So, of course, if you recognize that a particular lawsuit and a finding of liability could have major ramifications if you're not allowed to engage in those types of illegal practices, of course there would be an effort to see, can we settle on the cheap here?

On the Microsoft Activision case, critics said, you know, these weren't natural competitors, so why is the FTC getting involved here?

Do you think that that kind of opened the agency up to a lot of external criticism that you guys were intervening in cases that maybe were outside your traditional remit?

So that case in particular, that litigation is still ongoing.

But you raise an important question more generally, which is, are the only mergers that are illegal those that are between direct competitors?

Or do we think that mergers between different parts of the supply chain can also pose legal concern?

And you're right that for several decades, that was a view that vertical mergers in particular, or mergers between companies that are adjacent in a supply chain, there was a view that those were presumptively legal and maybe even competitively benign.

The FTC has taken action against those vertical deals and successfully blocked a half a dozen.

So you've been studying these issues for a long time.

I wonder where you think we are in the span of history in terms of monopolies.

Do you think it's better now in terms of the government's ability to prevent them?

Or do you think the rise of these technology companies has made it hard to really do the things that the government might've wanted to do in the past?

Well, the FTC was created during the backdrop of the Gilded Age and a real concern about industrial trusts and the robber barons and how these monopolies had come to wield just extraordinarily economic power, but also political power.

I think we're similarly at a moment where people recognize that when you have unchecked corporate power and unchecked monopoly power, that harms communities across America.

It means people are paying more, making less.

Small businesses, startups have less of an opportunity to get a fair shake.

And ultimately our democracy is more fragile.

When I would hear, especially in the run-up to the election, when I would hear from CEOs and business executives, your name would come up a lot.

I never heard of an FTC chair being known around the country as much as you were.

Democrats and Republicans, they were critical.

Did you hear that kind of feedback and how did you kind of process it and factor it into your leadership?

So I've made it a big priority to open up the agency and make sure we're getting feedback and input from all across the country, be it farmers in Iowa, you know, founders in Silicon Valley or pharmacists in Kansas City, to understand, you know, what are the economic challenges that they're facing?

From their perspective, do we have markets that are fair and honest and competitive or are there some problems there?

And across the board, what I heard from them was, we need more vicarious enforcement.

I mean, not once did I hear, well, the answer to our challenges is more monopolization or more consolidation and, you know, less antitrust enforcement.

I think there's a real recognition that when you don't have that type of fair and honest competition, people lose out.

Was there any point in 2024 before the election when Democrats or the White House said, can you just back off a little bit and give us some space, you know, stop kind of creating so much fury in Silicon Valley or across the business community?

No, the FTC is an independent agency and, you know, we've worked closely with government partners when appropriate, but we enforce the law without fear or favor and based on the facts.

What would you say was kind of your proudest moment as FTC chair?

Was there a case that you felt like really reflected your, you know, long-held beliefs about antitrust enforcement?

We just won a big case against the Kroger Albertsons merger, which has now been abandoned.

That would have been the largest supermarket merger in U.S. history.

I was invited to listening sessions across the country in places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, Denver.

Communities were really worried about what would happen to grocery prices and to grocery jobs if this deal were allowed to go through.

We got an opinion that fully vindicates the FTC's approach to rejecting risky fixes and flimsy promises.

In this case, we'd also alleged that the deal harmed labor markets illegally and the court advanced the analysis on that front as well.

You've written about and talked about the need to regulate artificial intelligence and I wonder if there's lessons learned from the rapid growth of big tech where if you don't kind of acknowledge and address something early, it might, you know, be too little too late.

I think one of the lessons from Web 2.0 has been that these moments of technological transition can be incredibly important inflection points where new arrivals have been opening it to come into the market and displace some of the old giants.

But these are also moments where those giants may panic and recognize that they face a major competitive risk and then resort to illegal monopolization, illegal acquisitions.

And so these technological inflection moments are ones where enforcers have to be especially vigilant and that's the approach we've been bringing.

This is one I heard a lot about from friends.

A range of businesses, hairdressers, a whole bunch of people encounter this kind of clause in some of their contracts.

You guys tried to take a step on this and it was knocked down in court.

I wonder if you could tell me a little bit about the lessons you learned from that and also the feedback you got on that rule from around the country.

So non-competes, as you noted, have proliferated beyond the boardroom.

So it's not just the C-suite that may be bound by them, but security guards, janitors, people across income levels, across professions.

When we proposed this rule to eliminate non-competes, we got 26,000 comments from across the country.

The stories that we heard were devastating.

I mean, we heard from a bartender in Florida about how she was sexually harassed at her job, decided to go get a job at a different restaurant and got hit with a lawsuit for tens of thousands of dollars.

And so she was facing a choice between continuing to be subjected to sexual harassment or facing financial ruin.

These non-competes can just be so detrimental to people's lives, and they're also bad for competition.

I mean, these are literally called non-competes.

We think we're right on the law and hope we'll be able to prevail.

Do you think you could have tailored the proposal a little bit differently to make it a little more legally indestructible, perhaps?

So we tailored the final rule where senior executives, the rule would only apply to prospectively, but existing non-competes could stay in place.

And so the revised rule was ultimately narrower than what we had initially proposed.

You know, some of the challenges that have been filed in court are taking aim at the FTC's ability to do these types of rules to begin with.

And so, you know, it's not clear to me that having said, well, only a subset of workers should get the protection from these rules rather than workers across the board would have changed it.

Do you expect a lot more M&A activity in a couple months once you leave and there's a new chair of the FTC?

Look, I completely understand that deal makers, you know, want antitrust cops to go away and to stop scrutinizing closely mergers and acquisitions.

And it's been vindicating to hear that the FTC's approach had had a market impact and was deterring illegal deals.

 So I hope that we won't see a backsliding there.