(Khan cut her teeth writing about the dangers of industry consolidation for the Washington Monthly magazine.) Looking toward a future in journalism, she moved to Washington and soon found herself working as a researcher at New America in its Open Markets Program on issues relating to economic power. Born in London, where her Pakistani parents met as college students, she grew up in a well-to-do New York City suburb before heading off to Williams College, where she was editor of the school newspaper. Khan is amazed and a bit amused by all the attention. Last spring, she was invited to join some of the most prominent academics in antitrust law to speak at an economic conference at the University of Chicago.
Her work has been cited by the Economist, the Financial Times, Forbes, Wired, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, and she has appeared on major broadcast media. Since it was published, Khan’s “note” has drawn more than 50,000 readers online - an extraordinary reach for a law review article. They even emerge in debates over the corrupting role of corporate money in politics, the decline in entrepreneurship, the slowdown in corporate investment and the rise of income inequality.Īnd just this week, Democrats cited stepped-up antitrust enforcement as a centerpiece of their plan to deliver “a better deal” for Americans should they regain control of Congress and the White House.įor Amazon, which prides itself on its relentless consumer focus, the suggestion that its spectacular growth might not be in the public interest poses a particular challenge. They are implicated in complaints that Facebook has aided the rise of “fake news” while draining readers and revenue from legitimate news media. They are also at the heart of the long-running battle in the telecom industry over net neutrality and the ability of cable companies and Internet service providers to give favorable treatment to their own content. The same issues lie behind the European Union’s recent $2.7 billion fine against Google for favoring its own services in the search results it presents to its users. It’s not just Amazon, however, that animates concerns about competition and market power, and Khan is not the only one who is worrying. The retail juggernaut was days from announcing its $13.8 billion purchase of Whole Foods, a deal that would not only roil the grocery industry but also trigger a government antitrust investigation into the strategies and practices of the “Everything Store.” And, as Zapolsky was no doubt aware, no organization had been more dogged in raising those concerns than New America - and, in particular, a 28-year-old law student named Lina Khan.Įarlier this year, the Yale Law Journal published a 24,000-word “note” by Khan titled “ Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” The article laid out with remarkable clarity and sophistication why American antitrust law has evolved to the point that it is no longer equipped to deal with tech giants such as, which has made itself as essential to commerce in the 21st century as the railroads, telephone systems and computer hardware makers were in the 20th. (Illustration by Paul Reid for The Washington Post)Īmazon’s general counsel, David Zapolsky, had a lot on his mind last month when he and four members of his legal team visited the offices of New America, a liberal-leaning think tank in Washington.