Who is Lina Khan
Lina Khan is the CEO of the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces the nation’s antitrust and consumer protection laws. She is a Pakistani American with a reputation of being a crusader against monopolistic practices of Big Tech. This was after she published an article titled, “Amazon’s antitrust paradox” in 2017 in the Yale Law Journal while she was still a student. She argued that the existing antitrust laws are not equipped to rein in the monopolistic tendencies of tech giants like Amazon, Google, Apple among others.
Prior to joining the FTC, she had earlier apprenticed as a legal advisor to FTC commissioner Rohit Chopra. She got her start in antitrust as a business reporter and researcher examining consolidation across markets, from airlines to chicken farming. In 2020, she and Commissioner Chopra published an article in The University of Chicago Law Review calling for the FTC to engage in antitrust rulemaking to supplement the development of antitrust law through judicial decisions.
She has also served as counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law. As well as an associate professor at Columbia Law School where she teaches and writes on antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, and the antimonopoly tradition.
How Old is Lina Khan
Lina is 35 years old; she was born on March 3, 1989 in London, England, UK.
Lina Khan Ethnicity
Lina is of Pakistani ethnicity. She was born in London to Pakistani parents before immigrating to the US at the age of 11.
Lina Khan Religion
Khan is a Muslim. She made history as the first Muslim Federal Trade Commissioner in U.S. history after her senate confirmation in June 2021.
Lina Khan Education
Khan attended Mamaroneck High School and then joined Williams College in Massachusetts for her undergraduate studies graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. She was also an undergraduate visiting student at Exeter College, Oxford for a term. She holds a J.D. from Yale Law School.
Lina Khan Parents Name
Khan’s parents have kept away from the spotlight and little is known about them apart from they are originally from Pakistan. They lived in the United Kingdom up until Khan was 11 years and migrated to the United States settling in Mamaroneck, New York. Her father was an employee of Thomson Reuters while her mother was a management consultant.
Is Lina Khan Married?
Lina is married to her husband Shah Rukh Ali, MD who is a a general cardiologist. He serves a principal investigator at the Shah Ali lab at Columbia University Irving Medical Center where he seeks to uncover molecular pathways that can regenerate the human heart.
He is of Pakistani descent and holds a medical degree from Stanford School of Medicine, where he studied cardiac regeneration and committed to the physician-scientist pathway. He did his residency in Internal Medicine at the University of California San Francisco and a Cardiology fellowship training at University of Texas Southwestern.
Lina Khan Son
Together with her husband, the couple shares a son although his name is not known to the public. she has managed to keep her son from the public eye.
Is Lina Khan a Lawyer?
Lina holds a Juris Doctor in Law but she is not a lawyer. She however was a majority counsel to the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, in the US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee.
Lina Khan Antitrust
Khan is known for her strong positions on antitrust behavior, particularly from tech companies. While still a student she wrote an article on Yale Law Journal on Amazon where she championed a unique approach to antitrust policy and sparked a new explosion of academic research on the topic. This caught the eyes of lawmakers trying to find new ways to reel in the dominance of America’s powerful technology companies.
In 2019, she was hired by Rhode Island Democratic Rep. David Cicilline to help in the investigation of Big Tech which led to the conclusion that tech giants enjoyed unchecked “monopoly power” that led to a raft of legislative proposals.
In addition, she is a former associate professor of Law at Columbia Law School where she teaches and writes about antitrust law, infrastructure industries law, the antimonopoly tradition, and law and political economy.
Her scholarship on antitrust and competition policy has been published in the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, and Yale Law Journal.
Lina Khan FTC
Khan was was nominated by President Joe Biden on March 22, 2021 as a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. She was confirmed by the Senate on June 15, 2021. Joe Biden then appointed her as chairperson of the FTC, becoming the youngest to hold the position at 32 years old.
Since she became chair of FTC, the commission has sued Meta where they sought t to prevent Meta from buying a virtual reality startup, Within Unlimited, and, in a rare move, to revisit and expand the scope of Meta’s historic $5 billion Cambridge Analytica settlement to cover children’s personal data; Microsoft, pushing to block the company’s $69 billion acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard; Amazon, among others.
Since her appointment, FTC has investigated or sued to block more than three dozen proposed mergers which in turn has led to 17 settlements, 17 deals being abandoned by the companies and one — the Within Unlimited case — where the FTC has conceded in the courts.
Lina Khan Non Compete agreement
In April 2024, FTC banned noncompete agreements to help promote competition as non competes often force workers to either stay in a job they want to leave or bear other significant harms and costs, such as being forced to switch to a lower-paying field, being forced to relocate, being forced to leave the workforce altogether, or being forced to defend against expensive litigation.
FTC determined that noncompete is a violation of Section 5 of the FTC Act as it is an unfair method of competition as they tend to negatively affect competitive conditions in labor markets by inhibiting efficient matching between workers and employers.
According to Khan, “Noncompete clauses keep wages low, suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism, including from the more than 8,500 new startups that would be created a year once non competes are banned. The FTC’s final rule to ban non competes will ensure Americans have the freedom to pursue a new job, start a new business, or bring a new idea to market.”
Lina Khan Amazon
Shortly after her graduation from Williams College, she was hired by Barry Lynn at the Open Markets Institute as a legal director. One of her first projects was an in-depth study of Amazon and its impact on authors and book publishing. This led her to publishing her viral 2017 law article about Amazon’s economic dominance “Amazon’s antitrust paradox”.
In September 2023, the FTC among more than a dozen states sued Amazon on basis of engaging in illegal business practices that allowed it to “wield monopoly power.” According to Khan, Amazon has taken actions that ultimately mistreat customers.
“The fees that it charges to small businesses have dramatically increased over the last few years, so that now some small businesses have to pay 1 out of every $2 to Amazon. It’s basically a 50% Amazon tax. Our lawsuit also alleges that Amazon has been using a whole set of secret algorithms to quietly raise prices for consumers. Our lawsuit alleges that if Amazon had not engaged in these illegal tactics, that would have allowed more rival online superstores to emerge, and that would be better for consumers who would face more price competition.”
Amazon opposed the lawsuit and even filed motions with the FTC requesting that Khan be recused from any decision related to their companies. She however didn’t recuse herself as she said in an interview that “the ethics law primarily require recusal when you have some kind of conflict of interest like having stock in a company or a close family member working for a company”
Lina Khan Apple
During an interview on ‘The Daily Show’ with Jon Stewart, Jon revealed that while he hosted
“The Problem with Jon Stewart” on Apple TV, they prohibited him from interviewing Lina Khan.
Lina Khan Salary
Khan earns an annual base salary of $500,000.
Lina Khan Net worth
Lina has an estimated net worth of $3 million.