The Hill: The Federal Trade Commission’s embarrassing antitrust crusade
By Stephen Kent: Lina Khan is one of the most radical chairs of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) the United States has ever seen. Luckily for consumers, Khan has not been very successful. The latest evidence comes from San Francisco, where Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California is presiding over the FTC v. Microsoft & Activision Blizzard’s preliminary injunction hearing.
The suit was brought on by the FTC over its expressed antitrust concerns for the burgeoning cloud video gaming industry. It’s not going well, and it’s because Khan is not guided by the traditional metrics of consumer protection and welfare that have long characterized the FTC’s approach to antitrust enforcement.
Coming off a predictable defeat in court against Meta over its bid to acquire the virtual-reality fitness company Within, President Biden’s antitrust warrior appears to have learned little. The FTC chair’s approach to blocking Meta’s purchase was to harken to an ominous “campaign to conquer VR” by Mark Zuckerberg, based on his previous acquisition of Oculus for the purpose of developing Meta’s capacity for VR headsets.
Where most see these tech acquisition deals as a simple matter of comparative advantage for companies looking to serve consumers better products at better prices, Lina Khan appears to see only the phantom of Standard Oil magnate John D. Rockefeller. It’s why her agency has adopted a more radical posture around antitrust policy, expanding its view of what constitutes unfair competition in a 2022 policy statement to include Yale-worthy buzzwords “exploitative, collusive, abusive” in its framework for identifying antitrust violations. The vagueness is the point.