Biden FTC Chair Suffers Major Losses After Picking Fight With Big Tech

Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan has suffered several setbacks this year in her efforts to block acquisitions by Big Tech firms, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

A federal judge on Tuesday ruled against the FTC to permit Microsoft’s record-breaking $69 billion acquisition of video gaming titan Activision Blizzard, just months after a judge similarly struck down an FTC effort to block Facebook-parent Meta’s acquisition of a virtual reality startup, the WSJ reported.  Khan publicly criticized Big Tech firms and advocated for stricter antitrust enforcement against them prior to her ascension to FTC chair under President Joe Biden, and she has faced years of GOP allegations of partisan bias.

Khan has indicated a willingness to bring difficult, losable cases to court in order to force them to clearly delineate their stance on what counts as anticompetitive, the WSJ reported.

“I’m certainly not somebody who thinks that success is marked by a 100% court record,” Khan said at a May 2022 eventat the University of Chicago. “If you just never bring those hard cases, I think there is severe cost to that that can lead to stagnation and stasis.”