It wasn't just that she had such a radical vision - it was also that she lacked the usual corporate law experience that such an appointee would normally require (experience that would ensure that the FTC was helmed by people whose default view of the world is that it should be structured and regulated by powerful, wealthy people in corporate boardrooms).
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Even more surprising was that Khan was made FTC *chair*, something that was only possible because a few Republican Senators broke with their party to support her candidacy:
https://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_votes/vote1171/vote_117_1_00233.htm
These Republicans saw in Khan an ally in their fight against "woke" #BigTech. For these senators, the problem wasn't that tech had got too big and powerful - it was that there were a few limited instances in which tech leaders failed to wield that power in the ways they preferred.
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The Republican project is a matter of getting turkeys to vote for Christmas by doing a lot of culture war bullshit, cruelly abusing disfavored sexual and racial minorities. This wins support from low-information voters who'll vote against their class interests and support more monopolies, more tax cuts for the rich, and more cuts to the services they rely on.
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But while tech leaders are 100% committed to the project of permanent oligarchic takeover of every sphere of American life, they are less full-throated in their support for hateful, cruel discrimination against disfavored minorities (in this regard, tech leaders resemble the corporate wing of the Democrats, which is where we get the "Silicon Valley is a Democratic Party stronghold" narrative).
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This failure to unquestioningly and unstintingly back culture war bullshit put tech leaders in the GOP's crosshairs. Some GOP politicians actually believe in the culture war bullshit, and are grossly offended that tech is "woke." Others are smart enough not to get high on their own supply, but worry that any tech obstruction in the bullshit culture wars will make it harder to get sufficient turkey votes for a big fat Christmas surprise.
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Biden's ceding of antitrust policy to the left of the party, combined with disaffected GOP senators viewing Khan as their enemy's enemy, led to Khan's historic appointment as FTC Chair. In that position, she was joined by a slate of Biden trustbusters, including #JonathanKanter at the DOJ Antitrust Division, #TimWu at the #WhiteHouse, and other important, skilled and principled fighters like #AlvaroBedoya (FTC), #RebeccaSlaughter (FTC), #RohitChopra (#CFPB), and many others.
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Crucially, these new appointees weren't just principled, they were *good at their jobs*. In 2021, Tim Wu wrote an executive order for Biden that laid out 72 concrete ways in which the administration could act - with no further Congressional authorization - to blunt corporate power and insulate the American people from oligarchs' abusive and extractive practices:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down
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Since then, the antitrust arm of the Biden admin have been *fuckin' ninjas*, Getting Shit Done in ways large and small, working - for the first time since Reagan - to protect us from predatory businesses:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff
This is in marked contrast to the corporate Dems' champions in the administration. People like #PeteButtigieg are heralded as competent
technocrats, "realists" who are too principled to peddle hopium to the base, writing checks they can't cash.
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All this is cover for a King Log performance, in which Buttigieg's far-reaching regulatory authority sits unused on a shelf while a million Americans are stranded over Christmas and whole towns are endangered by greedy, reckless rail barons straight out of the Gilded Age:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
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The contrast between the Biden trustbusters and their counterparts from the corporate wing is stark. While the corporate wing insists that every pitch is outside of the zone, Khan and her allies are swinging for the stands. They're trying to make life better for you and me, by declaring commercial surveillance to be an unfair business practice and thus illegal:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/12/regulatory-uncapture/#conscious-uncoupling
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And by declaring noncompete "agreements" that shackle good workers to shitty jobs to be illegal:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/02/its-the-economy-stupid/#neofeudal
And naturally, this has *really* pissed off all the right people: America's billionaires and their cheerleaders in the press, government, and the hive of scum and villainy that is the Big Law/thinktank industrial-complex.
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Take the *#WSJ*: since Khan took office, they have published *67 vicious editorials* attacking her. Khan is living rent-free in #RupertMurdoch's head. Not only that, she's got the presidential suite! You love to see it.
These attacks are worth reading, if only to see how flimsy and frivolous they are. One major subgenre is that Khan shouldn't be bringing any action against Amazon, because her groundbreaking scholarship about the company means she has a conflict of interest.
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Holy *moly* is this a stupid thing to say. The idea that the chair of an expert agency should recuse herself *because she is an expert* is what the physicists call *not even wrong.*
But these attacks are even more laughable due to who they're coming from: people who have the most outrageous conflicts of interest imaginable.
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These people who were conspicuously silent for years as the FTC's revolving door admitted the a bestiary of swamp-creatures so conflicted it's a wonder they managed to dress themselves in the morning.
Writing in *#TheAmericanProspect*, @ddayen runs the numbers:
> Since the late 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials worked directly for a company that has business before the agency, with 26 of them related to the technology industry.
https://prospect.org/economy/2023-06-23-attacks-lina-khans-ethics-reveal-projection/
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Take #ChristineWilson, a GOP-appointed FTC Commissioner who quit the agency in a huff because Khan wanted to do things for the American people, and not their self-appointed oligarchic princelings. Wilson wrote an angry break-up letter to Khan that the *WSJ* published, presaging their concierge service for #SamuelAlito:
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For Wilson to question Khan's ethics took galactic-scale chutzpah. Wilson, after all, is a commissioner who took cash money from Bristol-Myers Squibb, then voted to approve their merger with Celgene:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4365601-Wilson-Christine-Smith-final278.html
Or take Wilson's GOP FTC predecessor #JoshWright, whose incestuous relationship with the companies he oversaw at the Commission are so intimate he's practically got a Habsburg jaw.
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Wright went from Google to the US government and back again *four times*. He also lobbied the FTC on behalf of Qualcomm (a major donor to Wright's employer, George Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School) after working "personally and substantially" while serving at the FTC.
George Mason's Scalia center practically *owns* the revolving door, counting *fourteen* FTC officials among its affliates:
https://campaignforaccountability.org/ttp-investigation-big-techs-backdoor-to-the-ftc/
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Since the 1990s, 31 out of 41 top FTC officials - both GOP appointed and appointees backed by corporate Dems - "worked directly for a company that has business before the agency":
https://www.citizen.org/article/ftc-big-tech-revolving-door-problem-report/
The *majority* of FTC and DoJ antitrust lawyers who served between 2014-21 left government service and went straight to work for a Big Law firm, serving the companies they'd regulated just a few months before:
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Take #DeborahFeinstein, formerly the head of the FTC's Bureau of Competition, now a partner at #ArnoldAndPorter, where she's represented General Electric, NBCUniversal, Unilever, and Pepsi and a whole medicine chest's worth of #pharma giants before her former subordinates at the FTC. #MichaelMoiseyev who was assistant manager of FTC Competition is now in charge of mergers at #WeilGotshalAndManges, working for Microsoft, Meta, and Eli Lilly.
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There's a whole bunch more, but Dayen reserves special notice for #AndrewSmith, Trump's FTC Consumer Protection boss. Before he was put on the public payroll, Smith represented *120 clients* that had business before the Commission, including "nearly every major bank in America, drug industry lobbyist PhRMA, Uber, Equifax, Amazon, Facebook, Verizon, and a variety of payday lenders":
https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/andrew_smith_foia_appeal_response_11_30.pdf
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Before Khan, in other words, the FTC was a "conflict-of-interest assembly line, moving through corporate lawyers and industry hangers-on without resistance for decades."
Khan is the first FTC head with no conflicts. This leaves her opponents in the sweaty, desperate position of inventing conflicts out of thin air.
For these corporate lickspittles, Khan's "conflict" is that she has a *point of view*. Specifically, she thinks that the FTC should do its job.
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This makes grifters like #JimJordan furious. Yesterday, Jordan grilled Khan in a hearing where he accused her of violating an ethics official's advice that she should recuse herself from Big Tech cases. This is a talking point that was created and promoted by *#Bloomberg*:
That ethics official, #LoriellePankey, did *not*, in fact, make this recommendation. It's simply untrue.
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(She *did* say that Khan presiding over cases that she has made public statements about could be used as ammo against her, but did *not* say that it violated any ethical standard.)
But there's more to this story. Pankey herself has a *gigantic* conflict of interest in this case, including a stock portfolio with $15,001 and $50,000 in Meta stock:
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(Meta is another company that has whined in print and in its briefs that it is a poor defenseless lamb being picked on by big, mean ole Lina Khan)
Jordan called his hearing on the back of this fake scandal, and then proceeded to show his whole damned ass, even as his GOP colleagues got into a substantive and even informative dialog with Khan:
https://prospect.org/power/2023-07-14-jim-jordan-misfires-attacks-lina-khan/
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Mostly what came out of that hearing was news about how Khan is doing her job, working on behalf of the American people. For example, she confirmed that she's investigating #OpenAI for nonconsensually harvesting a mountain of Americans' personal information:
https://www.ft.com/content/8ce04d67-069b-4c9d-91bf-11649f5adc74
Other Republicans, including confirmed swamp creatures like #MattGaetz, ended up agreeing with Khan that Amazon Ring is a privacy dumpster-fire.
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Nobodies like Rep #TomMassie gave Khan an opening to discuss how her agency is protecting mom-and-pop grocers from giant, price-gouging, #greedflation-drunk national chains. #JeffVanDrew gave her a chance to talk about the FTC's war on #robocalls. #LanceGooden let her talk about her fight against horse doping.
But Khan's opponents did manage to repeat a lot of the smears against her, and not just the bogus conflict-of-interest story.
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They also accused her of being 0-4 in her actions to block mergers, ignoring the *huge* number of mergers that have been called off or not initiated *because* M&A pros now understand they can no longer expect these mergers to be waved through. Indeed, just last night I spoke with a friend who owns a medium-sized tech company that Meta tried to buy out, only to withdraw from the deal because their lawyers told them it would get challenged at the FTC, with an uncertain outcome.
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These talking points got picked up by people commenting on Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley's ruling against the FTC in the Microsoft-Activision merger. The FTC was seeking an injunction against the merger, and Corley turned them down flat. The ruling was objectively *very bad*. Start with the fact that Corley's son is a Microsoft employee who stands reap massive gains in his stock options if the merger goes through.
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But beyond this (real, non-imaginary, not manufactured conflict of interest), Corley's judgment and her remarks in court were *inexcusably* bad, as #MattStoller writes:
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers
In her ruling, Corley explained that she didn't think Microsoft would abuse the market dominance they'd gain by merging their giant videogame platform and studio with one of its largest competitors. Why not? Because Microsoft's execs pinky-swore that they wouldn't abuse that power.
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Corely's deference to Microsoft's corporate priorities goes deeper than trusting its execs, though. In denying the FTC's motion, she stated that it would be unfair to put the merger on hold in order to have a full investigation into its competition implications because Microsoft and Activision had set a deadline of July 18 to conclude things, and Microsoft would have to pay a penalty if that deadline passed.
34/
This is surreal: a judge ruled that a corporation's radical, massive merger shouldn't be subject to full investigation because that corporation itself set an arbitrary deadline to conclude the deal before such an investigation could be concluded. That's pretty convenient for future mega-mergers - just set a short deadline and Judge Corely will tell regulators that the merger can't be investigated because the deadline is looming.
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And this is all about the future. As Stoller writes, Microsoft isn't exactly subtle about why it wants this merger. Its own execs said that the reason they were spending "dump trucks" of money buying games studios was to "spend Sony out of business."
Now, maybe you hate Sony. Maybe you hate Activision. There's plenty of good reason to hate both - they're run by creeps who do shitty things to gamers and to their employees.
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But if you think that *Microsoft* will be better once it eliminates its competition, then you have the attention span of a goldfish on Adderall.
Microsoft made *exactly* the same promises it made on Activision when it bought out another games studio, Zenimax - and it broke every one of those promises.
Microsoft has a long, long, *long* history of being a brutal, abusive monopolist. It is a *convicted* monopolist.
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And its bad conduct didn't end with the browser wars. You remember how the lockdown turned all our homes into rent-free branch offices for our employers? Microsoft seized on that moment to offer our bosses keystroke-and-click level surveillance of our use of our own computers in our own homes, via its #Office365 #bossware product:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge
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If you think a company that gave your boss a tool to spy on their employees and rank them by "productivity" as a prelude to firing them or cutting their pay is going to treat gamers or game makers well once they have "spent the competition out of business," you're a credulous sucker and you are gonna be *so* disappointed.
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The #enshittification play is obvious: use investor cash to make things temporarily nice for customers and suppliers, lock both of them in - in this case, it's with a subscription-based service similar to Netflix's - and then claw all that value back until all that's left is a big pile of shit.
The Microsoft case is about the future.
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Judge Corely doesn't take the future seriously: as she said during the trial, "All of this is for a shooter videogame." The reason Corely greenlit this merger isn't because it won't be harmful - it's because she doesn't think those harms matter.
But it does, and not just because games are an art form that generate billions of dollars, employ a vast workforce, and bring pleasure to millions.
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It also matters because this is yet another one of the Reaganomic precedents that tacitly endorses monopolies as efficient forces for good. As Stoller writes, Corley's ruling means that "deal bankers are sharpening pencils and saying ‘Great, the government lost! We can get mergers through everywhere else.’ Basically, if you like your high medical prices, you should be cheering on Microsoft’s win today."
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Ronald Reagan's antitrust has colonized our brains so thoroughly that commentators were surprised when, immediately after the ruling, the FTC filed an appeal. *Don't they know they've lost?* the commentators said:
https://gizmodo.com/ftc-files-appeal-of-microsoft-activision-deal-ruling-1850640159
They echoed the smug words of insufferable Activision boss #MikeYbarra: "Your tax dollars at work."
https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1679277251337277440
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But *of course* Khan is appealing. The only reason that's surprising is that Khan is working for us, the American people, not the giant corporations the FTC is supposed to be defending us from. Sure, I get that this is a major change! But she needs our backing, not our cheap cynicism.
The business lobby and their pathetic Renfields have hoarded all the nice things and they don't want us to have any. Khan and her trustbuster colleagues want the opposite.
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There is no measure so small that the corporate world won't throw a conniption. Take #ClickToCancel, the FTC's reasonable idea that if you sign up for a recurring payment subscription with a single click, you should be able to cancel it with a single click.
The tooth-gnashing and scenery-chewing over this is *wild*. America's biggest companies have wheeled out their biggest guns, claiming that if they make it too easy to unsubscribe, they will lose money.
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In other words, they are *currently* making money not because people want their products, but because it's too hard to stop paying for them!
https://www.theregister.com/2023/07/12/ftc_cancel_subscriptions/
We shouldn't have to tolerate this sleaze. And if we back Khan and her team, they'll protect us from these scams. Don't let them convince you to give up hope. This is the start of the fight, not the end.
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We're trying to reverse 40 years' worth of Reagonmics here. It won't happen overnight. There will be setbacks. But keep your eyes on the prize - this is the most exciting moment for countering corporate power and giving it back to the people in my lifetime. We owe it to ourselves, our kids and our planet to fight one.
eof/
Cory Doctorow
Gina Helfrich, PhD