Profile of Lina Khan, whose antitrust argument, which says Amazon has far too much power, is making waves in Washington by reframing decades of antitrust law
With a single scholarly article, Lina Khan, 29, has reframed decades of monopoly law. — The dead books are on the top floor of Southern Methodist University's law library.
Context & Ripple Effects
This 2018 profile captures the moment Lina Khan's 'Amazon Antitrust Paradox' argument moved from a law-review page into Washington's live debate: that a company can suppress competition through below-cost pricing and platform control even while consumer prices stay low, breaking with decades of consumer-welfare orthodoxy. The arc since then is unusual for an academic — Biden named her FTC chair after a 69-28 Senate confirmation, giving the paper's author direct power to test it.
First-order effects
- Amazon becomes the named test case for a new antitrust framework: scrutiny shifts from whether prices rise to whether its scale and platform role itself constitute market power.
- Khan's argument hands regulators a doctrinal basis to challenge acquisitions and conduct that the old standards would wave through, starting with tech deals in nascent markets.
Second-order effects
- Her FTC operationalizes the framework beyond Amazon — extending the theory to buyer-side power via monopsony analysis and upending merger review norms with the attempt to block Meta's Within acquisition.
- Big Tech acquirers face a changed deal environment: transactions once considered routine now draw structural challenges, raising the cost and uncertainty of growth-by-acquisition strategies.
Third-order effects
- The binding constraint is institutional, not intellectual: antitrust experts identify a conservative judiciary as the biggest obstacle, meaning aggressive cases may fail in court even as they reset enforcement norms — a risk some longtime FTC staffers warned about internally.
- If the pattern holds despite courtroom losses, antitrust settles into a structural-power standard where platform dominance is actionable on its own terms, decoupling enforcement from short-term consumer prices.
The trend: American antitrust is shifting from a consumer-price standard toward structural theories of platform power, with Khan's career — paper to FTC chair to courtroom tests — marking the doctrine's migration from academia into enforcement.