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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

We need all new antitrust laws. The size of these companies is itself a problem. They have so much power that there is no possibility for fair competition. Maybe we can start by taxing companies that are worth more than 1 trillion at an extremely high rate.

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I wonder who would prosecute them. What about an AG who, when confronted about doing a bad job, deflects by pointing out that Nasdaq is "smashing records?"

I'd be in favor of giving Lina Khan a lifetime appointment to heading the FTC along with 10x their current budget to tackle exactly this problem.

A major part of the problem isn't even that we don't have laws on the books, it's that funding to the enforcement agencies has been gutted to the point where they can mostly just go after extreme egregious violations or very easy to win cases. The IRS is in exactly the same boat.

That would be great, but I think even her job needs new laws. Otherwise, one of the problems is even hardcore enforcement takes years and huge amounts of taxpayer expense. We need to make it simple, cheap, and quick to improve competition.

I don't disagree. I think she's about the perfect person to be involved in writing those new laws in some fashion.

She's not the AG anymore, though I'm not claiming that Todd Blanche is better.

Luckily, Lina Khan has just announced The Center for Law and the Economy at Columbia University, which is going to be training the next generation of antitrust lawyers for the US. If we are lucky, she will also be working on much bigger things than that at the same time. If we are doubly lucky, she will be training hundreds of new lawyers as good as she is.

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