Lina Khan's obsession with "big is bad", especially her preexisting prejudice of Big Tech should have disqualified her from any position well before she took the wheel.
How many times did the FTC fail in court under her watch? More than I can count on two hands.
Meanwhile local and state utility and cable tv monopolies continue to _flourish_ without so much as a peep.
> especially her preexisting prejudice of Big Tech should have disqualified her from any position well before she took the wheel.
The purpose of the FTC is literally to take regulatory action to prevent unfair competition. Your argument is that you shouldn't appoint a commissioner on the basis that they think large tech companies are engaging in anti-competitive behaviour?? Note that this position isn't playing dictator; the FTC is subject to judicial oversight.
> Meanwhile local and state utility and cable tv monopolies continue to _flourish_ without so much as a peep.
How do we know this isn't just your preexisting prejudice of cable companies? Maybe you've just got an obsession with "big [cable] is bad"? On a serious note – it seems that you _do_ agree with antitrust regulation, just not against Facebook/Amazon for some reason (and only against Comcast)??
You expect a perfect success rate against the highest paid lawyers in the world? At least she was trying to enforce antitrust for once.
Big is bad bro. There’s like 5 companies carrying the entire S&P rn how is that good for anyone outside of those 5 companies?
Doesn't have to be a perfect success rate... how about just something other than abysmal failure rate?
Asserting a sloganized refrain is not very convincing. Make a real argument. Here are some counterpoints to "big is bad" Neobrandeisianism: -Scale enables better economics for certain businesses which consumers and other businesses then benefit from. -Large size allows additional speculative cutting edge R&D funding which the whole world benefits from even if it never pays off. -Being big on its own is almost never a cheat code to permanent monopoly / monopsony lock-in, especially in the technology business. That comes from actual anti-competitive behavior or regulatory capture (which ARE the parts that should be regulated, rather than targeting or preventing size for its own sake).
The S&P point is more than a bit overstated and it also doesn't really matter? The subset of the S&P that's performing well will naturally get weighted higher over time, until the performance changes. It doesn't really matter if the S&P is driven by 5 enormous companies or 500 equally-sized ones. Whatever works at the moment is what gets rewarded with capital -- that's the point of the system and it's been more effective than any alternatives. Besides, it'd be poor investing practice to be literally all-in on the S&P.
Scale enables big companies like Amazon and Walmart to force anti-competitive vendor and pricing agreements that harm small businesses.
Meta is top 10 for DC lobbying. No regulatory capture to see here.
Big is bad? She went up against Amazon which is literally one company that delivered on lowering costs to consumers. She doesn’t understand the fact that there are NATURAL monopolies outside of utilities. You would know this if your training is more than a couple of intro level courses in economics.
And why is it that no one is talking about the biggest vertical and horizontal roll ups in all of corporate America in healthcare? Interesting.
> Big is bad bro
Using "big" as a synonym for "consumers are worse off than alternatives" does not do anyone justice.
> At least she was trying to enforce antitrust for once.
Her prejudice against big tech and pretty much ignoring any other industries is not something to be proud of.
- Three major court wins (Illumina, Tapestry/Capri, Kroger/Albertsons), multiple deals dropped.
-Over $1.5B refunded. Significant settlements (Epic, MoneyGram, Amazon delivery drivers, etc.)
- Junk-fees ban, click-to-cancel rule (You can thank the current administration for walking back on this), non-compete ban.
-Right to repair, data privacy enforcement, health-care pricing interventions ( reduced out-of-pocket costs for inhalers and insulin).
I’m unclear what your first point is saying
FTC under her blocked Kroger/Albertsons, blocked Tapestry/Capri, ended non-competes, enacted click to cancel, made major strides on right to repair, etc. in addition to all the “prejudice against big tech” which are the titans of industry right now…
Big doesn't necessarily mean that consumers will be worse off than small. Just like having a dictator doesn't neccesarily mean that citizens will be worse off then in a democracy. What it does mean in both cases is that if the powerful entity decides to abuse their power for their own gain, it's very difficult (albeit not entirely impossible) to do anything about it. It's therefore better in the long-run to preempt this and bias towards smaller entities that are each less powerful.
Under Khan, the FTC has abandoned the standard of consumer harm, and now just blocks mergers based on vibes. I really liked this article criticizing her approach:
https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/the-ftcs-antitrust-ov...
I stopped reading when they defended Albertsons and Kroger merger. Can anyone defend the consolidation of grocery stores with a straight face? Walmart has obliterated any competition and it has destroyed local food sources everywhere. They can do it at scale that no one can compete with. If the only solution is to further consolidate then we might as well just hand over the government to Walmart.
And yet, groceries have never been cheaper. So the question becomes which do you want: consumer benefits, or your aesthetic preferences regarding how big a company should be?
Groceries have gotten cheaper because the companies selling it pass off their negative externalities to society.
Groceries were cheapest around 2000 and have gotten more expensive since? Particularly 2020 on
Should jobs be a factor as well? I see a lot of job loss in small town Iowa and Nebraska. I don't live there and people there have definitely voted with their wallets.
Food plus quality price index in Japan and France look better to me despite the lack of Walmarts.
And, I read some things about price collusion of the major grocers during the pandemic that makes me concerned.
I will say, thanks for being a human and discussing this as a human. Too many bots on HN lately.
You can analyze it on that basis, but it's a political question. Is the grocery industry a jobs program?
Big tech has been ignored for quite some time compared to other industries.
I don’t get the downvotes. He’s just stating his opinion. Lina Khan had zero real-world experience. She wrote ONE widely circulated opinion piece in law school. It contained barely any rigorous economic analysis. This is akin to giving authority to some 21-yo philosophy major to direct the entire direction of US AI policies.
What AI experience did Sam Altman have before becoming OpenAI CEO? Wasn’t he just a VC wunderkind beforehand?
I am not a big Sam Altman fan but this is not a good comp. Sam is an insider in SV and one of the biggest at that. He knows everyone. You are basically saying Sam didn’t know anything about AI yet he is one of OpenAI’s founding members. Unlike Elon, at least Sam knows a thing or two about actual software dev.
Okay, what experience did Musk have in aerospace when he founded SpaceX?
He had money. Why do you keep conflating people doing business using their own money with appointing government officials with zero experience?
I thought this place was against credentialism and all about experimentation utilizing people who show promise? Whither “talent investing”?
Her opinion should not be taken seriously on the matter. It's not just the empirically terrible track record she had as a regulator and the baffling cases she brought to bear (imo proof of your point that she had an overgeneralized bias). It's also that she was demonstrably inexperienced at the time she was selected! It was clearly performative political appointment, which the Biden administration was pretty egregious about (and so have both Trump administrations, this is not a political point).
The essay (literally, a homework assignment she did at law school) for which she became famous that criticizes Amazon for being big is so chock full of errors, misconstructions and faulty logic, that it's an indictment of some really poor political habits and instincts that the US is prone to. That due diligence in vetting her as a rigorous and informed thinker on the topic failed is an unequivocal failure.
>The essay (literally, a homework assignment she did at law school) for which she became famous that criticizes Amazon for being big is so chock full of errors, misconstructions and faulty logic, that it's an indictment of some really poor political habits and instincts that the US is prone to.
source?
https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
She got boosted by an insurgent group of law professors who spearhead whats called the Neobrandeis moment. Their theory is that anti-trust should be preemptively enforced against size for its own sake.
This is the article she wrote for her law review as a law student which put her on their radar and they started calling her a "rising star" etc etc, which snowballed into the performative appointment by the Biden admin.
Feel free to read through it.
Performative and ineffective but somehow actually deterred a lot of M&A? How does that make sense?
What errors?
A lot beyond the scope of the time I have to comment here. Read it with an open mind, knowledge of tech business, knowledge of how things unfolded since it was published and see for yourself.
But some short hand:
-Assumes vertical integration is necessarily abusive
-Assumes lowering price is necessarily a setup for anti-competitive practices. This one’s particularly ironic because lowering prices is definitely a first-order good for consumers and businesses that buy those goods. Bezos’ famous saying was “your margin is my opportunity” —- would you rather the standard continue to be massive retailer markup profit that goes straight to retail corps?
-Vague scare tactic claims that expanding into media production etc will somehow (yadda yadda, Step 2: ???) lead to monopolies in every category they enter.
The TLDR of the problem with Neobrandeis is it forms a very opinionated paranoid notion that size can only lead to bad things and no good things. It is a lazy dodge around the traditional responsibility of regulators to identify and regulate actual anti-competitive behavior when it actually happens By constraining companies from using any form of size or integration-related advantage, it lowers the pressure to actually be competitive and innovative for everyone else. I’m not saying everything should be unconditionally allowed, there’s a balance to strike. But when you just have a blunt “anti-size” hammer, you’re gonna do collateral damage to a healthy competitive ecosystem in a damaging way.
> It is a lazy dodge around the traditional responsibility of regulators to identify and regulate actual anti-competitive behavior when it actually happens
Traditional since the ‘70s, when Chicago school jackasses got their way and all but destroyed antitrust enforcement, in practice.
A shift back would be great. Let’s get a little more traditional.
We’ve seen this TV show before, but nobody paid attention. The magnificent 7 are essentially the ITT/LTV/Litton of the 1960s reborn. GE is the other one of more recent memory.
Massive diversified entities get bureaucratic, unwieldy and ineffective over time.
What gets me about this Lina Khan hero worshipping is that she has ZERO real-world experience. It’d be one thing if she crafted a worthy law career in fighting big corp. She never put in any hard work. She essentially an influencer.