Lina Khan’s very bad week

Written By:

Oliver Wiseman

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Lina Khan’s very bad week

https://thespectator.com/newsletter/lina-khan-bad-week-dc-diary-07-14-23/

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Have you had a bad week? Well, take some consolation from the fact that it probably wasn’t as bad as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s. On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked Khan’s attempt to scupper Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover of gaming company Activision. The case is the latest in a series of high-profile defeats for the progressive wunderkind and face of so-called hipster antitrust. On Thursday morning, Elon Musk’s Twitter asked a judge to override an FTC order relating to its data practices and accused Khan’s agency of misconduct and bias towards it. Later that day,…

Have you had a bad week? Well, take some consolation from the fact that it probably wasn’t as bad as Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan’s.

On Tuesday, a federal judge blocked Khan’s attempt to scupper Microsoft’s $75 billion takeover of gaming company Activision. The case is the latest in a series of high-profile defeats for the progressive wunderkind and face of so-called hipster antitrust.

On Thursday morning, Elon Musk’s Twitter asked a judge to override an FTC order relating to its data practices and accused Khan’s agency of misconduct and bias towards it. Later that day, Khan appeared in front of the House Oversight Committee, where she received a no-holds-barred grilling from Republican chair Jim Jordan.

The problem for Khan, though, is not that she has had a turbulent week (those are par for the course in Washington) but that, two years after she was appointed FTC chair at just thirty-two, she has startlingly little to show for it. Biden named Khan to the FTC post after she made a name for herself as a leading voice calling for a more muscular government response to big tech. At the time, her selection by Biden was cheered by his party’s left wing.

But Khan’s time in power has been heavy on controversy, light on wins. The two remaining Republican commissioners have resigned in protest at her approach. In an op-ed announcing her departure in February, Christine Wilson accused Khan and “her enablers” of having a “disregard for the rule of law and due process.” And while Khan’s novel legal arguments on antitrust earned her plaudits and media profiles, they haven’t proved especially appealing to the judges hearing the FTC’s cases.

It was a similar story back in February, when a court rebuffed the agency’s effort to block a Meta acquisition of Within, a virtual reality games business.

Notwithstanding her conspicuously short list of legal victories, Khan has been on an interesting trajectory from an anti-big tech standard bearer to a symbol of the Biden administration’s penchant for regulatory overreach and lawmaking by other means.

Not so long ago, some Republicans were sympathetic to Khan. Some applied a my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend logic to this progressive critic of Silicon Valley’s big beasts. These days, she is a more straightforwardly partisan figure, as yesterday’s House hearing made clear. That’s in part because of her actions at the FTC, but it’s also because of the leadership change at Twitter, which means there is at least one tech giant that Republicans can sympathize with.

Khan will likely be undaunted by her defeats. Indeed, her FTC has now set its sights on artificial intelligence. The agency sent OpenAI a letter this week which included a wide-ranging series of questions and requests for documents. According to the letter, the FTC is investigating whether OpenAI “engaged in unfair or deceptive privacy or data security practices or engaged in unfair or deceptive practices relating to risks of harm to consumers.” The move is in keeping with Khan’s hyperactive approach. OpenAI chief Sam Altman will hope it is as successful as Khan’s crusade against his primary investors at Microsoft.

On our radar

KAMALA HARRIS ON AI “AI is kind of a fancy thing. First of all it is two letters. It means artificial intelligence… ultimately what it is, is about machine learning. And so the machine is taught. And part of the issue here is what information is going into the machine that will then determine… what then will be produced in terms of decisions and opinions that may be made.”

BIDEN RAISED $72 MILLION Joe Biden’s reelection campaign raised $72 million from April to June. The figure is a long way short of the $105 million raised by Donald Trump’s campaign over the same period ahead of his 2020 re-election bid.

Biden’s bougie brunch lid

Get in loser, we’re going to brunch! The Biden White House is proving its liberal bonafides by eschewing “lunch lids” in favor of the much more elite — and very DC — “brunch lid.”

The White House typically calls a temporary press lid for a couple of hours each afternoon. This is a period of time where there are no public events on the president’s schedule and everyone in the press corps is allowed to rest and recharge.

Previous administrations were big on calling these “lunch lids,” but due to the pause on activity starting earlier in the day and the Biden admin just being bad and bougie, “brunch lid” has become the new favorite term. From Cockburn’s rough count of White House pool reports so far this year, the Biden admin has called thirty-nine lunch lids and forty-two brunch lids. Talk about a bottomless brunch!

–Cockburn

DeSantis at a crossroads

ABC reports that Ron DeSantis is mulling a change in media strategy. The Florida governor and his team have taken great pride in their confrontational relationship with the mainstream media. But with Trump’s top challenger stalling in the polls, his team are reportedly considering doing many more mainstream TV interviews and town halls.

Beyond media strategy, the DeSantis campaign is at something of a crossroads. This week brought reports that the Murdoch empire has cooled on him, as well as news that big GOP donors like Ken Griffin, who have backed DeSantis until now, are now considering alternatives.

–OW