Lina Khan’s time as boss of the Federal Trade Commission may be running out, but she’s not going quietly.
The FTC chairman recently signed a request to Microsoft (MSFT) that is hundreds of pages long and demands information related to a long-running antitrust investigation into the tech giant, according to Bloomberg.
The research is broad in scope and, according to Bloomberg, touches on everything from cloud computing to artificial intelligence. Microsoft is a dominant cloud provider and has invested nearly $14 billion in AI startup OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT.
Khan has aggressively pursued lawsuits and investigations against some of the biggest tech giants since his appointment by President Joe Biden in 2021. But this latest escalation comes just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump is set to retake the Oval Office in January.
Khan is not the only US regulator to turn the dial in the latter part of Biden’s term.
Another is Rohit Chopra of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which on Friday claimed to have oversight of Google’s payments platform Google Payment Corp.
This immediately resulted in a lawsuit from Google parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL).
The company sued CFPB and Chopra, who is expected to leave once the Trump administration takes office, saying CFPB’s action “suffers from numerous legal flaws.”
Billionaire Elon Musk, a key adviser to the new Trump administration, has called for the abolition of the CFPB. It has sued and fined a number of financial technology companies and other startups it accused of misleading customers.
What may be telling in these late actions by the FTC and the CFPB is that they are both targeting Big Tech companies, an area where the Biden administration may have some alignment with Trump 2.0.
Trump is making it clear he has no plans to soften up the country’s tech giants once he returns to the Oval Office.
The latest signal came last week when he said he would appoint Gail Slater, an aide to newly elected Vice President J.D. Vance, to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division. Vance has expressed his admiration for Khan’s aggressive approach.
“Big Tech has run amok for years,” Trump said in a statement announcing Slater’s appointment on his Truth Social platform, “suppressing competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, diminishing its market power is used to crack down on human rights. from so many Americans, as well as those from Little Tech!”
“I was proud to fight these abuses during my first term, and our Justice Department’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership,” he added.
It was the first Trump administration to initially sue Google over antitrust concerns, leading to a district court ruling in August that the tech giant was illegally monopolizing the search engine market. The DOJ has asked a judge to consider breaking up the company in a separate phase of the lawsuit, which won’t be completed until 2025.
It was also during the first Trump administration that the FTC attempted to unwind Meta’s (META) acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in a case that was set to go to trial in April. The first Trump administration also launched an antitrust investigation into Apple (APPL), leading the Biden administration to sue the iPhone maker earlier this year.
The New York Post reported last week that the question of who should replace Khan at the FTC is turning into a battle as those who want a more aggressive or favorable approach to Big Tech make their views known.
Republicans who want a smoother M&A environment prefer Melissa Holyoak, a Republican FTC commissioner, according to the Post. Other possibilities include another Republican FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson and former DOJ and FTC official Mark Meador.
There is certainly no guarantee that Khan’s replacement will take a similar stance, or continue her activities.
“We don’t know who will succeed Lina Khan, but you can be sure it won’t be anyone with Lina Khan’s philosophy,” said former FTC member and antitrust professor Robert Lande of the University of Baltimore Law School.
Lande, who served on the FTC’s Bureau of Competition during the transition between the administrations of President Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan, said the FTC’s future is more of a wild card compared to the DOJ.
“There’s this idea that anyone can be chairman of the FTC,” he said, noting that attendees included former Postal Rate Commission chairwoman Janet Steiger and Dan Oliver, former editor of the conservative news outlet National Review .
“So Trump can deploy anyone he wants,” Lande said. “It’s not necessarily going to be an antitrust lawyer, or a consumer protection lawyer,” or someone with a background in law, economics or business.
A new chairman with no antitrust expertise, or one whose competitive philosophies diverge with Khan, could alleviate the many legal threats that big tech companies currently face. The pace of continued scrutiny will undoubtedly depend on the joint efforts of the DOJ and the FTC.
In the history of the FTC, Lande said there have only been two periods of what he called “serious activism.” One was led by Democratic Chairman Michael Pertschuk, who was chairman before President Reagan was elected.
“The second was Lina Khan.”
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