How Lina Khan's FTC is using the concept of “monopsony”, a market where one buyer is pre-eminent, to push for Big Tech antitrust regulation
Federal Trade Commission chief Lina Khan has developed an innovative way to frame the issue. Whether she has the tools to see it through remains to be seen.
Context & Ripple Effects
The monopsony framing is the doctrinal extension of the argument Lina Khan has been building since her 2018 profile of her Amazon critique made waves in Washington: that dominance can be exercised through buyer power even where consumer prices fall. The FTC under Khan now has the institutional platform to test that idea, and her 2017 paper calling for Amazon's break-up is the intellectual throughline from academia to enforcement.
The stakes are legal acceptance, not just rhetoric. Khan's attempt to block Meta's Within acquisition already upends decades of antitrust standards, and the biggest obstacle her agenda faces is a conservative judiciary that has made it hard for regulators to win big cases — with critics pressing the take-it-to-the-courts strategy as flawed ahead of a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
First-order effects
- The FTC gains a theory of harm it can plead in cases where the consumer-welfare standard has historically failed — Big Tech defendants like Amazon must now litigate buyer-power claims, not just price effects.
- The Meta/Within challenge becomes the live test case: if courts accept the reframed standards there, the FTC's monopsony theory gets its first judicial foothold.
Second-order effects
- A conservative federal judiciary, already identified as the agenda's biggest obstacle, becomes the decisive gatekeeper — losses at the trial-court level would force the FTC to appeal to build precedent rather than settle.
- Rivals and smaller suppliers of dominant platforms acquire a usable legal vocabulary to challenge gatekeeper conduct, and congressional critics gain a concrete target in oversight hearings on FTC management.
Third-order effects
- If courts accept buyer-power theories, US antitrust's operating standard shifts from consumer prices to structural power, making nascent-industry mergers and platform intermediation reviewable even when consumers pay nothing.
- Enforcement would then depend on sustained judicial and political buy-in across administrations — the pattern holds only if the courts strategy survives its early losses.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is shifting from a price-based consumer-welfare standard toward structural-power theories of harm, with court acceptance — not agency intent — setting the pace.