From Wall Street to Silicon Valleylucky time, everyone wants to know what’s next for Lina Khan.
On Wednesday, the youngest-ever chair of the Federal Trade Commission reached the end of her three-year term, during which she helped to overhaul the government’s approach to antitrust enforcement and brought a slew of lawsuits against major corporations.
Ms. Khan, 35, can remain in her seat indefinitely, unless she is replaced. There are factions rooting loudly for each of those outcomes.
Under her leadership, the F.T.C. has brought antitrust cases against the tech giants Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, sometimes employing ambitious legal arguments. The agency has tried to ban almost all noncompete clauses and blocked Lockheed Martin and Nvidia from making multibillion-dollar deals.
A powerful bipartisan cohort believes the F.T.C. chair is stretching the scope of antitrust law past its legitimate limits, rashly working to redefine the bounds of key concepts such as monopolization.
Ms. Khan, her staff and her allies essentially contend the opposite: that her leadership is restoring the role of robust, active antitrust enforcement in a legal and economic system that for too long has let those regulatory muscles atrophy to the detriment of consumers and healthier market competition. Consumer watchdogs and some conservatives have cheered on Ms. Khan, defending her populist moves, like the agency’s recent warning to makers of inhalers that their aggressive use of patent loopholes may violate federal law.
Some Democratic donors connected to finance and tech, however, have publicly campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris to remove Ms. Khan as chair of the F.T.C., if she wins the presidential election in November. Her campaign declined to comment on whether she would support Ms. Khan’s staying in the position.
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