Comment by tossandthrow

It does feel like Lina Khan's FTC was much more willing to play the part in the adversarial system. Don't necessarily agree with every decision but was surprising to see how willing the FTC was to jump into things and make unpopular (to stakeholders at least) decisions

> Could they have accomplished more?

unfortunately a lot of these things are on an election cycle.

One of the main problems in the US is that the US has an extremely broad antitrust statute:

> Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is hereby declared to be illegal.

> Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony, ...

It was passed in the era of robber barons and meant to be a strong hammer against anti-competitive practices. But because it was so broad, the courts kept chipping away at it over time through reinterpretation because by its terms it would prohibit a lot of things the courts didn't really want to get involved in policing, or they just made bad calls in years when the Court's majority wasn't that smart.

Meanwhile monopolists generally have a lot of money to pay expensive lawyers, so they structure their activities to fit within the loopholes the courts have carved out over the years and that makes it hard for an administration to hold them to account even when they have the will to do it.

Hyper-partisanship also makes this worse, because if everyone is convinced the other side is pure evil then they're going to try to undo anything the other party was trying to do without even considering what it is, which isn't compatible with long-term prosecutions that would have to span administrations.

The sentiment i picked up from HN is that she was more of an activist leader with a grudge against big corporations and that this clouded her judgement. The cases she bought were insubstantial and fell apart. She's a bad poster child for what the FTC should be.

> i thought it was strategic - to ensure global dominance in tech

I don't like the way this is phrased because it nearly implies that doing this is an advantage to the US population.

"Preventing foreign dominance in tech" is plausibly a legitimate goal. Preventing a foreign tech monopoly is a good thing. But the assumption that this can only be achieved by a domestic one is the fallacy. A domestic monopoly is still a disadvantage compared to a competitive market with a multitude of domestic companies.

Unless you're an authoritarian that wants to leverage the monopoly for the purposes of e.g. censorship. But then you're an enemy whose goal is to harm even the domestic population.

It is. Some members of congress somehow magically end up buying tech stocks right before they go to the moon or selling them right before tariffs hit.

It's as if they have some insider knowledge or something, and also a lot of skin in the game to protect these monopolies.

And give gold idols

Big Tech isn't exactly Trump's base. Trump collects wins[1] for his base at the expense of his non-supporters. Not sure how this makes Trump "not smart".

1 - Regardless of what you think of tariffs, his base largely considers them wins.