Outgoing FTC Chair Lina Khan Among 24 Changemakers Named by The Hill

The Hill has named Federal Trade Commission’s chair Lina Khan as one of its 24 Changemakers for 2024. The second annual list highlights both the household names and lesser-known players who are making an impact at the Capitol and around the world. 

Khan, 35, the youngest-ever chair of the FTC, has often been described as the most ambitious, compelling, and controversial antitrust thinker in a generation. Under the leadership of Lina Khan, the outgoing Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the agency took on a more active antitrust and consumer protection role, which was largely successful and sometimes controversial.  She has has “gone head-to-head with some of America’s most powerful companies, including Amazon, Microsoft, Lockheed Martin and Kroger,” The Hill says. Along with the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the FTC, under Khan, has blocked dozens of deals in recent years, citing concerns that excessive consolidation undermines competition. 

In a recent  interview with comedian Hasan Minhaj, Khan said the FTC “protects the  public, and it’s inevitable that when you’re taking on powerful corporations that are breaking the law, there’s gonna be pushback. And we think it’s important to stay focused on who we represent and who we’re fighting for, and that’s the American people.”

Khan’s aggressive antitrust actions have made her a political lightning rod and sparked backlash from Wall Street and its allies in Washington, with big names in business and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle lobbying  for her prompt ouster in the next administration.  

This week, the FTC passed “a sorely needed ban on junk fees,”according to New Republic, which, however, won’t come into effect won’t come into effect until she—and President Biden—is long gone.On Dec. 17, the announced a rule that will require companies to show full prices for things like a hotel room, concert ticket, or sporting event at the beginning of a purchase rather than hiding it until the very last step of the checkout process. Junk fees came into the light particularly after Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2022, when thousands of fans were enraged by hidden or unknown service fees from Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

1. People deserve to know upfront what price they’re being asked to pay, without worrying they’ll later be hit with mystery fees they can’t avoid.

Today @FTC finalized a rule to ban these junk fees for short-term lodging and live-event ticketing.https://t.co/zwLEe3BUxL

— Lina Khan (@linakhanFTC) December 17, 2024

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. 

As a law student, she published a groundbreaking article in The Yale Law Journal that generated coverage in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” argued that antitrust enforcers should move away from their singular fixation on price and focus on the broader range of harms that arise from anticompetitive behavior. As FTC chair, she’s infused the sleepy agency with that same thinking, while bringing lawsuits against Big Tech.

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.