Admin, Author at Antitrust Education Project

Federal Judge Red Cards Lina Khan and the FTC

Judge Ada Brown, a federal judge in North Texas, on Wednesday slapped a preliminary injunction halting the Federal Trade Commission from enforcing a sweeping, nationwide ban on noncompete agreements.

Big Sleep

Progressive antitrust has denounced, investigated or sued Big Chicken, Big Sandwich, Big Grocery, and Big Tech, of course. Now the FTC is suing to block Tempur Sealy’s acquisition of Mattress Firm, an American mattress store chain.

Europeans Get Real About Putting America’s Most Competitive Companies Out of Business

French antitrust authorities, after a dawn raid last year on Nvidia’s offices, is set to follow up with a big new antitrust lawsuit against this U.S. chipmaker. Nvidia is the manufacturer of graphic processing unit chips – GPUs – that have the massive computing power that enable increasingly robust artificial intelligence. French authorities have let it be known it will charge Nvidia for anti-competitive practices in this space.

Yglesias, Singer and the Socialist Siren Song of Progressive Antitrust

The Khanservative movement – those on the right increasingly supportive of FTC Chair Lina Khan’s progressive, aggressive antitrust policies – is expanding within the MAGA movement and Republican politics. Some conservatives, like Sens. J.D. Vance and Marco Rubio, are Khanservative adjacent, expressing reservations about corporate power, impacts on workers, and Big Tech content curation. Others, like Reps. Matt Gaetz, Ken Buck, and Sen. Josh Hawley, are all-in for Lina, gleefully supporting anything that brings a bad day to woke C-suites and the many mansions of the tech mogul kingdom.

Lina Khan Facing Stiff Resistance from New Republican Commissioners

Lina Khan as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission has blazed a path largely unobstructed by Congress, an adoring press, and a professional staff that she has isolated and intimidated. Only the courts have served as a bulwark, blocking her more exotic legal theories and kicking four of her big cases to the curb.

Lina Khan’s “Mob Bosses” Comment Reveals Her Thuggish Ideology

On Tuesday night at TechCrunch’s Strictly VC event in Washington, D.C., Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan described the administration’s antitrust lawsuits against Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta and (soon, it appears) NVidia and Microsoft as part of a larger strategy. She said that “being able to go after the ‘mob boss’ is going to be more effective than going after the henchman at the bottom.”

Kanter and Khan Prepare to Open Fire on OpenAI and Nvidia

The news broke yesterday that the Federal Trade Commission under Lina Khan and the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division under Jonathan Kanter have divvied up the investigations of the nascent AI sector for monopolistic conduct. Khan will lead the examination of Microsoft’s investment in Open AI, maker of Chat GPT. Kanter will lead in the investigation of NVidia, which makes AI chips.

Federal Judge in North Carolina Prevents FTC from Killing Two Hospitals

The antitrust power of the Federal Trade Commission includes the ability to suspend business deals while agency’s experts review it, sometimes to death. It must have come as shock today to Chair Lina Khan when federal judge Kenneth D. Bell denied the FTC’s injunction request to prevent the non-profit Novant Health in North Carolina from completing its $320 million bid to buy two hospitals.

Why the Apple Case Is No Microsoft

The Department of Justice’s landmark antitrust case against Microsoft demonstrates the classic behavior that justifies an antitrust lawsuit. How does Jonathan Kanter’s DOJ Antitrust Division case against Apple stack up against that big precedential case of Microsoft?

San Francisco Fed Study Refutes Biden-Khan-Warren Line on “Greedflation”

In March, President Biden followed up on his State of the Union complaint about half-empty potato chip bags by launching an initiative to “fight corporate rip-offs” that drive inflation around the country.