Lina Khan’s FTC went after Big Tech. Trump could dial that back.
Lina Khan has been hailed by liberal Democrats and even some Republicans as a historic change agent as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, laying out a far-reaching doctrine for checking corporate power and calling out some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies as alleged monopolists.
President-elect Donald Trump appears to have a very different agenda. He has pledged to dramatically pare back the federal government’s reach, including by curbing what he called the “regulatory onslaught” from independent agencies like the FTC. His decisive electoral victory, drawing on support from tech magnates and blue-collar workers alike, could scale back many of Khan’s efforts to rein in alleged anticompetitive abuses across the technology sector, legal experts and former federal officials said.
“It’s very likely you’re going to see a significant shift in enforcement focus of the FTC, a significant reduction in the aggressive interventions,” said Gene Kimmelman, who served as an adviser for the Justice Department under President Joe Biden.
Khan quickly emerged as a linchpin of the Biden administration’s plans to tackle corporate consolidation after being tapped to chair the FTC in 2021. She took up blockbuster lawsuits accusing titans like Meta and Amazon of abusing their monopoly power, and launched sweeping efforts to craft new regulations on issues such as data privacy and artificial intelligence. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
Under Khan, the FTC has aggressively challenged attempts by tech giants to expand by scooping up start-ups and potential competitors, including Microsoft’s $69 billion deal to acquire the video game maker Activision and Meta’s purchase of the virtual reality company Within.
Federal courts sided with the companies in both cases, and the deals have since closed. Still, proponents of stricter antitrust enforcement praised Khan for testing novel legal arguments and laying the groundwork for future challenges against major mergers and acquisitions.
Neil Chilson, who was acting chief technologist at the FTC during Trump’s first term, called that stance “radical” and said the agency would probably take a less adversarial posture toward deals in the tech sector under the next Trump administration.
“A Trump FTC will be interested in winning, not just making political statements” or setting new legal precedents, Chilson said. The FTC declined to comment.
Under both the Trump and Biden administrations, the FTC and the Justice Department launched major antitrust lawsuits accusing Silicon Valley giants of holding illegal monopolies. Trump’s Justice Department and FTC targeted Google and Meta over their dominance in online search and social media, respectively, while under Biden the FTC sued Amazon over its grip on e-commerce and the Justice Department accused Apple of monopolizing the smartphone market. (Khan’s FTC refiled the lawsuit against Meta after the one started by Trump’s FTC was dismissed in court.)
In August, a federal court sided with the Biden administration and declared Google to be an illegal monopoly, marking the biggest antitrust victory for federal enforcers against the tech giants in decades. The other big cases are unresolved and expected to drag well into the approaching Trump administration.
That gives the new administration a chance to shape how federal enforcers prosecute those cases and what concessions they seek from the companies. In the Google search case, which is being led by Justice Department antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, another key figure in Biden’s agenda against corporate power, a federal court will decide next summer what steps the tech giant must take to address its finding that Google violated federal antitrust law.
Trump recently raised eyebrows in Washington by voicing concern about the prospect of the federal government breaking up Google, one of the remedies the Justice Department is seeking. Asked about the case in October, Trump warned that breaking up companies can be “a very dangerous thing” because the United States did not want to lose out to China on having “great” tech companies.
The remarks may signal a greater willingness under Trump to settle cases with companies rather than defeat them in court, some antitrust experts said, in line with the president-elect’s pledge to ease regulatory burdens and bring independent agencies under increased White House control.
“Trump appointees may be more inclined to think the settlements can be effective,” said William Kovacic, who chaired the FTC under President George W. Bush.
Spokespeople for Trump and the Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment.
Trump’s campaign previously referred an inquiry about his stance on tech and antitrust to a post on his Truth Social platform in which he said he would “GO AFTER” Meta and Google over allegations of censorship. “WILL BE MUCH TOUGHER THIS TIME,” he added. During his first term, Trump sought to enlist the FTC in an executive order targeting tech companies’ liability protections over claims of bias.
There is historical precedent for such a shift in posture in antitrust cases.
As a presidential candidate in 2000, Bush suggested he would not have pursued the blockbuster lawsuit the Justice Department filed against Microsoft under President Bill Clinton, saying he stood “on the side of innovation, not litigation.” After Bush took office, the Justice Department reversed its strategy and abandoned plans to seek a breakup of the giant. The two sides later settled.
Former federal officials said they expect to see more wholesale change at the FTC than at the Justice Department’s antitrust division under Trump, partly because the agency has also sought to craft new rules on privacy and AI, at times over vocal opposition from the agency’s Republican commissioners.
Trump has railed against agencies such as the FTC acting like a “fourth branch of government, issuing rules and edicts all by themselves.”
Kovacic, the former FTC chair, said that many of the FTC’s efforts to craft rules under Khan are “highly reversible” and that the agency under Trump will probably hew to a “narrower conception of what the FTC role ought to be.”
While Khan was confirmed to the commission with bipartisan support, Republicans have increasingly soured on her aggressive enforcement approach.
Trump’s most visible supporter, Elon Musk, escalated his long-running feud with Khan in the final weeks of the presidential campaign. “She will be fired soon,” Musk tweeted Oct. 31, sharing a link to a report written by House Republicans that claimed the FTC under Khan’s leadership engaged in a “sweeping destruction of agency norms.”
Musk’s battles with Khan have made her a lightning rod among many conservatives, including House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), whose panel has produced multiple reports that are critical of Khan’s leadership of the agency.
The intense interactions with Republicans have largely stemmed from the agency’s probe of whether X, the company formerly known as Twitter, violated privacy settlements with the agency. Months before Musk took over the company, the agency started investigating a July 2023 whistleblower complaint alleging that the company was burying “egregious deficiencies” in its cybersecurity defenses. That probe expanded in the wake of Musk’s takeover, as former employees warned that broad staff departures could render the company unable to comply with its promises to the FTC to protect data privacy.
Earlier this year, the FTC told the House Republicans in a letter that its probe into X’s privacy practices revealed no evidence that Musk had violated the 2022 order. But that investigation reshaped Khan’s relationship with many Republicans, who had at times treated her as an ally in their challenges of Big Tech’s power.
Some conservatives in Trump’s orbit have been supportive of Khan’s work against Big Tech, most notably Vice President-elect JD Vance. In February, he said Khan was “one of the few people in the Biden administration” that was “doing a pretty good job.” And one of Vance’s advisers, Gail Slater, has been tapped to help vet a replacement for Khan at the FTC, according to a Bloomberg News report.
That has generated some hope among advocates of a muscular antitrust policy that the Trump administration might tap a new FTC chair who would pick up on the populist legacy that found voice in both his campaign and in Khan’s stance against corporate power.
“With a potential merger wave incoming, the new administration must decide whether they will take the side of big corporations or working families, and back that decision up with key personnel and strong enforcement,” said Jimmy Wyderko, communications manager for the left-leaning American Economic Liberties Project.
The Trump administration, Kovacic said, “will continue to bring skepticism about [tech] firms to what they do in a variety of different policy domains,” though “with some moderation” compared with Khan’s approach. And even if many of her actions are reversed, Kovacic said, she has prompted a “fundamental reconsideration” of how aggressively the agency should challenge mergers.
“She has changed the debate about antitrust policy,” he said. “That’s a major achievement that will go on well after the day she leaves the building.”
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Cat Zakrzewski and Eva Dou contributed to this report.
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