Biden Nominates Antitrust Expert Lina Khan For FTC Commissioner

US President Joe Biden intends to nominate Lina Khan, a former counsel to the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, to be a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the White House announced on Monday, March 22.

Lina Khan is an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School, where she teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, and the antimonopoly tradition. Her antitrust scholarship has received several awards and has been published by the Yale Law Journal, Harvard Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and University of Chicago Law Review.

Khan previously served as counsel to the US House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law, where she helped lead the Subcommittee’s investigation into digital markets. Khan was also a legal advisor in the office of Commissioner Rohit Chopra at the Federal Trade Commission and legal director at the Open Markets Institute. She is a graduate of Williams College and Yale Law School.

Khan’s nomination follows the appointment of Tim Wu, a Columbia Law professor, to work on technology and competition policy at the National Economic Council. Wu coined the term “net neutrality” and has been a prominent voice on the subject of antitrust regulation against Big Tech companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Biden’s choice of Khan to serve at the FTC comes as regulators, lawmakers, and the courts are facing immense pressure to take on Big Tech. The House Judiciary kicked off the second leg of its antitrust investigation last month and it’s poised to introduce competition legislation to rein in tech this spring.