Pete Huang

Let me walk you through the background, some of what the FTC has done recently, and what they're looking at with these inquiries.

Lena Kahn is the chairperson of the Federal Trade Commission, the part of the US government responsible for enforcing antitrust law and protecting consumers.

In 2021, President Biden nominated her to the FTC and then immediately appointed her to be the chair of the whole thing.

She was 32 years old when that happened, just three years out of law school.

She's the youngest person to ever be named chair of the FTC.

Lina Khan has been looking at antitrust and anti-monopoly for a while now.

She went to undergrad at Williams College studying political science and then spent four years at a think tank conducting anti-monopoly research.

She then went to law school at Yale, which has graduated more politicians, judges, CEOs, and top lawyers than you and I could ever think of.

And in her third and final year of law school, she publishes an article in the Yale Law Journal titled Amazon's Antitrust Paradox.

Her core argument in the paper argued that the way the government understood and enforced antitrust was too narrow for the age of modern companies.

She spends the paper digging into the business model and business practices of Amazon, exploring just how dominant they are and arguing that the nature of the business requires a different way to pursue antitrust.

This paper is an absolute hit in the legal field.

That certainly includes all of the big tech companies that we know of today.

Now, after she graduates law school, Lena Kahn joins the FTC staff.

She works under an existing commissioner by the name of Rohit Chopra.

And just three years later, Commissioner Chopra moves on and President Biden taps Lena Kahn to replace him.

Lena Kahn is a trailblazer in the legal field, and she's spent a lot of time thinking about the right level of wrangling that the government should be doing with big tech.

To this end, she has been very successful.

Now, under Lena Kahn's leadership, the Federal Trade Commission, in partnership with the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, has filed more challenges to corporate mergers in 2022 than any year prior.

If you're a company and you do a deal, and if that deal is worth more than $111 million, you have to let both the FTC and the DOJ know, and you have to wait 30 days before you close the deal.