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Lina Khan Raises The Heat On Amazon

By  |  June 25, 2023

By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Ravi Mattu, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni

The F.T.C. chair shot to fame six years ago after publishing an academic article that the company needed to be contained. Legal experts wonder if that time has come.

In 2017, Lina Khan, then a 29-year-old law student, shot to fame with an academic article about why Amazon should be contained. Cutting against prevailing trends in antitrust law, Khan argued that the e-commerce giant was unfairly dominating huge swaths of the American economy.

Now the chair of the F.T.C., Ms. Khan has finally taken on Amazon, though her agency’s new lawsuit against the company isn’t focused on antitrust. Still, legal experts are wondering whether, or when, she will follow through on the theory that won her renown in the first place.

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