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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

I don't care who wins the election next month, Lina Khan needs to be kept as FTC chair. The FTC has been on a roll the past while.

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I happened to come across her on 60 Minutes a couple of weeks ago, and that interview seemed awkward and sound-bitey to me. Thinking that she just might not be great at short-form segments I dug a little deeper and found an awesome long-form interview that she did with the Council on Foreign Relations. I highly recommend this to get a feel for what she is actually like as a policy person. She really impressed me.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=L_QaZk5iJOA

When Lina took over she wiped her series of interviews, thought pieces, etc from the internet almost over night (I've followed her since she was a fellow). Her long form writing and podcast interviews are incredible. She knows this problem space well in both modernity and history as well as having vision for the future. There is no one else I trust more than Lina to right this ship.

Why do that?

Nobody can hold you to account for what you said in the past if you wipe the evidence.

I would think unless her opponents were incompetent they would have made copies of all that when there was a chance she would be appointed. Maybe even before that, if they keep an enemies list.

Prof G also interviewed her recently. It was a good one.

Nice link, that was an interesting watch.

What has she done that didn't fail or get shot down as political overreach?

(not being sarcastic...i mean that i may have missed something inadvertently)

The FTC has succeeded at a lot of things that just aren't very interesting to report on. I'd recommend reading through FTC press releases. They generally release a statement whenever a major action is started and resolved. By my count in the past year or so the FTC was involved in at least 12 successful anti-monopoly actions (I counted modified mergers, killed mergers, and divestments).

The most consequential merger win was probably the NVIDIA/ARM merger that died under FTC litigation.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2022/02/...

Of the reports linked, didn't look very inconsequential. A light touch maybe.

Thanks...that's the insight i was hoping for, great links. much appreciated.

Not GP. I would say that her effectiveness is both in Fire and Motion [1], while one wants more Fire, before the status quo was not only no fire, but also no motion. Even the motion is a good starting point that businesses are having management adapt their strategies and plans to account for the motion, just out self-interested risk mitigation in case there is more fire than there currently is today, and that fire gets trained on them.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

A good analogy, but I think you swapped the meaning of fire and motion in your usage of it.

In this case, her cases even if lost would be the equivalent of cover fire. Businesses need to re-act to the cover fire and cannot advance (perform their own motion) while she is firing.

The second part is that you would hope/expect her to be able to gain territory in the near future via the "motion" part of the strategy.

So I agree in your framing, just from my perspective you flipped the terminology.

That seems really bad for the government to be doing this. If she is losing, then using the resources of the government to harass businesses that are acting lawfully seems like fascism.

harassing shitty actors, even if they're technically obeying the law, is not fascism

> didn't fail or get shot down as political overreach?

Progress requires testing the system and seeing where the failure points are. It's significantly better than the relative nothing we've gotten from past admins.

Also with the current judicial and congressional makeup it's a wonder anything gets done.

Using public resources to sue companies, force them to pay for expensive defense in court, and then losing when the court decides they did nothing illegal?

Yes, that is how our justice system works. First, the government accuses you of a crime, then they have to prove that you committed it, and you get to defend yourself.

How else could it possibly work? Companies just get to break the law and no one can ever take them to court over it?

I’m not suggesting the justice system should change. I’m suggesting that civil servants who file and lose a ton of suits should be presumed to be doing net harm. Just as we would for prosecutors in criminal law.

And when it’s politically motivated, it is not just harm in the sense of economic inefficiency, but further is unjust and lowers public trust in institutions.

The problem is that what you're suggesting will eventually boil down to useless regulators. And then companies will do a plethora of suspicious things, and then you the consumer will suffer.

It's the FTC's job to do this kind of thing. If we argue it shouldn't be their job then what will we be doing? Nothing? We've tried the "do nothing" approach more times than any of us can count, and it doesn't work.

A plethora or suspicious things? If the companies are breaking the law, the FTC can sue them and win. If the companies are complying with the law, the FTC should indeed do nothing. If the law is bad, congress can pass new laws.

What's not OK is for the executive branch to not like the law, but be unsuccessful at passing new law through the democratic process, and then use the FTC to unsuccessfully sue companies in order to punish them (and threaten others) with costly legal expenses.

It's not that simple, because people don't know if they're breaking the law. The job of the FTC is to clear that up. It's a fallacy that laws can just be followed or not, almost all the time it's in a gray area.

I’m specifically talking about the situation where you lose almost all the cases. When that happens, it’s not called “clearing up the law”, it’s called frivolous lawsuits.

All law enforcement is by definition politically motivated because it is the politicians that write the laws.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your conclusion, but legislators generally don’t make prosecutorial decisions. Prosecutorial decisions are generally made after legislation is passed, by a different branch of government.

[flagged]

Can you please not break the site guidelines when posting here? You did it twice in this thread unfortunately (the other place was here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41773709).

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and make your substantive points thoughtfully and respectfully, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are, we'd appreciate it.

but things that do get done were definitely critically reviewed, so that's something.

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/never-seen-anything-like-...

I suppose the question is - despite her failures, do we agree with the policy that she / the Biden administration are pushing?

If so, then if she isn't the right person for the job, is there someone who will be more successful?

Her massive political overreach has achieved the goal. The chilly effect on all the behavior they want to stop but don't have the authority too.

It's basically the executive sidestepping the legislator and blocking perfectly legal behavior by the threat of burying it in such long and expensive lawsuits it's not longer viable.

I don't know if I accept Khan's framing of, even though I haven't won any cases I have scared off potential mergers and that is a win. I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.

I'd piss off a lot of investors I know by saying this – nerfing the Adobe and Figma acquisition seems excellent for consumer good.

3 years ago that would have just been rubber stamped.

Their work on non-tech stuff has probably been even more effective, too.

>I think the US already leans too heavily on tying everything up in courts forever.

yes, because companies have decided to consider courts as a cost to do business instead of a regulator they must not piss off at any cost. the courts in that capacity will simply be abused, especially as these fast moving tech companies can make billions beofore a case shuts it all down.

Definitely needs to be some reform to how punishment works, especially retroactive costs.

Was the successful Google antitrust case not brought by the feds?

That was the DOJ not the FTC.

Don't fall for the Silicon Valley propaganda that things are on the downswing because the FTC is not allowing mergers or acquisitions. Plenty of both of those have happened this year. DirectTV is in the process of acquiring Dish Network and SlingTV which is one of the largest acquisitions of the year and should alone perish the thought that mergers aren't happening.

If only the FTC could claim credit for the disappearance of free money

The claim that there are less mergers happening is from Khan not Silcon Valley.

“Sometimes, you know, the companies decide that they’re going to abandon the merger,” Khan said. Stahl asked if abandoning a merger amid the FTC’s scrutiny was a win, to which Khan said, “That’s right.” https://legal-mag.com/ftcs-lina-khan-defends-merger-and-acqu...

Yes, because some mergers are bad. Like really really bad. For you and me, consumers.

If adobe merged with figma that would be catastrophic for that domain. Prices would skyrocket, quality would invariably fall off, and innovation would stagnate due to lack of competition.

Part of having a free market is maintaining it. You can't have a free market if it's constantly consolidating into a monopoly or pseudo-monopoly. This is bad for the products, for the market, and for the consumer.

The keyword in that last sentence is market. Plenty of people will argue what the FTC is doing is stifling economic growth - but it's the opposite. Anti-competitive behavior stifles economic growth in the long run, so preventing it allows smaller companies to grow and innovate. Keeping slow moving giants on life support and de-facto welfare is not good for the economy.

I don't disagree with some of the aims of Lina Khan, mostly just the strategy. Scaring away potential mergers is much, much less valuable than establishing case law or getting legislation passed. It is kinda parallel to overreliance on executive orders over legislative wins.

> Scaring away potential mergers is much, much less valuable than establishing case law or getting legislation passed

There're a few problems with this:

1. Our lawmakers are incredibly inefficient, and many dedicated their lives to ensuring new laws don't get passed. Doesn't matter what the law is, they're career "blockers"

2. Our courts are not unpartisan, and many are conservative-leaning, and they'll simply continually strike down laws until they make it up and up and then the extremely conservative supreme court blocks it. This has been Texas' strategy.

You can't establish case law if you don't take cases. Companies not wanting to go through with mergers because they are afraid of the FTC investigating them sounds like a side effect and not the intent.

It's a mix of both. Some mergers fall through under regulation fear. Others fall through because aquisitions are expensive and it'd take years to make up for the cost (like the activision/blizzard one that was announced when money was cheap and went through when money became expensive).

>DirectTV is in the process of acquiring Dish Network and SlingTV which is one of the largest acquisitions of the year

What's wrong with that? Who still watches TV (either OTA or from satellite) in this age, except for elderly people who haven't figured out how to use the internet? This seems like people complaining about the consolidation of companies in the landline telephone market. It's a dying market, so of course the companies still hanging on are going to merge so they can save costs and squeeze the few remaining customers more.

Yes, Khan has been a disaster for the FTC. Grossly overreaching, media grandstanding and then quickly losing in court in not-even-close rulings is not some kind of win.

What rulings are you talking about?

Too early to call. At least initially, her FTC was incompetent to the point that M&A lawyers were urging companies to attempt mergers because shit that wouldn’t usually get through would get bungled in court. She was aggressive but incompetent.

She appears to be improving. But the FTC chair isn’t an internship.

I am happy for her to be aggressive and would forgive mistakes in court simply due to the value brought to society by her prominently going after these large anti-competitive companies. And yes she might fail to address that as well, but I wouldn’t ascribe that failure to her competency. The reality is that no one in this seat has even been trying. They’ve been asleep at the wheel as the economy gets increasingly captured by megacorps that don’t really face competition. And if she fails to rein them in, it’ll be because the existing law (antitrust law) is inadequate, more than anything else.

I think the attention she’s bringing to the issue will cause many people to ask why antitrust enforcement has to be so hard. Any company with more than $100B in revenue is a quasi-government, and damages fair competition merely through their existence. Instead of making enforcement rely on years-long court cases, we need more immediate ways to break up or regulate these companies, and what we have today is not enough. If her attempts make more people realize the current laws aren’t enough, that might be its own form of success.

Richard Feynman was brought onto what would become the Manhattan project at age 24. He had not yet earned a graduate degree.

Lina Khan was 32 when she started as FTC chair. Prior to that, she had researched anti-trust at the New America Foundation, received a JD from Yale, worked as a legal director at the Open Markets Institute, worked as a legal fellow at the FTC, and served as counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust.

I don't disagree that she made some early missteps at the FTC, but this is far from her first rodeo. I also think that, on balance, it's a benefit to hire young, promising voices to positions of power, and that we should get back to a place where we do that a lot more.

Mozart composed a symphony at 9. What does that have to do with anything?

You’re comparing a bureaucrat to Feynman? Absurd.

RIP. I don't think project 2025 has plans to gut the FTC, just most other federal agencies. It obviously matters a ton who wins, but the outcome may likely be the same regardless.

I hope they absolutely fuck up FAANG.

Wrath of Khan and I'm here for it.

I would buy a “Wrath of Khan” shirt to support her efforts, 100%. It’s good for innovation and competition to break up these thuggish megacorps.

I wish a POTUS candidate would come out in support of Khan so I could point to that as a reason to support that candidate (it’s definitely a component of how I’d vote).

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