Will a Trump-Vance Administration Double Down on Progressive Antitrust?
Donald Trump’s selection of Sen. J.D. Vance as his running mate – and now, likely Vice President – has a heroic, almost Teddy Roosevelt aspect to it. After Trump himself gamely survived an assassination attempt in the T.R. mold, he selected a man whose rise through military, academic and literary fame is almost as meteoric as that of the original Rough Rider.
Read MoreRobert Bork Jr. on Pro America Report with Ed Martin
Robert Bork Jr. joins Ed Martin on the Pro-America Report.
Read MoreFederal 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.
Read MoreBig 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.
Read MoreEuropeans 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.
Read MoreYglesias, 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.
Read MoreLina 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.
Read MoreLina 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.”
Read MoreKanter 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.
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