Who’s Afraid of Lina Khan? Apparently, It’s the Mighty Apple, According to Jon Stewart
- ‘The Daily Show’ host had wanted to talk to the young Pakistani American head of FTC on his Apple TV+ show about her crusade against Big Tech.
On this week’s episode of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show,” host Jon Stewart landed a bombshell that sent shockwaves across Big Tech — that the highest valued company in the world, Apple, wouldn’t let him interview FTC Chair Lina Khan during his stint on now-canceled show on Apple TV+.
While interviewing Khan on April 1, Stewart disclosed that when he was hosting a podcast on Apple TV, the company wouldn’t let him interview her. “I wanted to have you on a podcast, but Apple literally said, ‘Please don’t talk to her,’” Stewart told Khan. “I didn’t think they cared for you is what happened,” he said. “They wouldn’t let us do even that dumb thing we just did in the first act on AI. What is that sensitivity? Why are they so afraid to even have these conversations out in the public sphere,” he wondered.
The 35-year-old Pakistani American, reputed to be a crusader against monopolistic practices of Big Tech, responded by saying, “I think it just shows the danger of what happens when you concentrate so much power and so much decision-making in a small number of companies.”
Stewart’s admission came days after the U.S. Justice Department sued Apple for abusing its monopoly position in the smartphone market. The complaint specifically calls out Apple’s dominance as potentially harmful to speech.
Stewart’s Apple TV+ show — “The Problem with Jon Stewart” — ended late last year after he and Apple executives “parted ways over creative differences, including the comedian’s desire to cover topics such as China and AI,” the New York Times reported. The show ran for two seasons from 2021 to 2023.
Shortly after Khan was confirmed as the head of the FTC in 2021, she signaled the FTC’s intent to go after “business models that centralize control and profits,” the Verge reported. More recently, the agency has “engaged in antitrust lawsuits against Amazon and Microsoft and is currently investigating those companies’ investments (along with Google’s) in OpenAI and Anthropic.”
Khan had earlier apprenticed as a legal advisor to FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra, now director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. She got her start in antitrust as a business reporter and researcher examining consolidation across markets, from airlines to chicken farming.
Prior to joining the FTC, she served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law. She was also an associate professor at Columbia Law School. She is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School.
She earned her reputation as a crusader against Big Tech after she penned an article in 2017 while she was still a law student at Columbia titled, “Amazon’s antitrust paradox.” In the paper, Khan argued that the existing antitrust laws are not equipped to rein in the monopolistic tendencies of tech giants like Amazon, Google, Apple, and others. An associate professor of law at Columbia Law School, she teaches and writes on antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, and the antimonopoly tradition.
Before joining Columbia, she served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she led the congressional investigation into digital markets and the publication of its final report. Her academic work “examines the limits of the current paradigm in antitrust law, assessing how its welfare-based framework fails to capture empirical realities and betrays the republican origins of antitrust,” according to her website.
Khan was born in London and moved to the U.S. with her family at age 11. She earned her B.A. in Political Theory from Williams College in 2010 and her J.D. from Yale Law School in 2017. Originally, she aspired to become a journalist for The Wall Street Journal. To this end, she served as editor of the student newspaper The Williams Record at Williams College and of Yale’s Yale Law Journal. “I realized that the law is one of our main tools for dealing with monopolies,” Khan told Time magazine in an October 2019 interview. Before joining Yale, she worked at the New America Foundation, where she did anti-monopoly research and wrote for the Open Markets Program.
She is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School, where was awarded the Reinhardt Fellowship for public interest law. She was among several South Asian Americans named in Time Next 100, highlighting emerging leaders who are shaping the future. She is married to Shah Ali, a cardiologist at Columbia University in Manhattan. The couple has a baby boy.
(Top photo, The Daily Show via YouTube)