Lina Khan

“So, the antitrust laws in the United States don't create some kind of cap on a company's size or on growth; they really distinguish between fair and unfair methods of competing. And so there are certain methods of competing that are totally fair game.”

“There's a whole line of critique about Amazon that's culture-based, about how they're wrecking the experience of bookstores. I personally am less focused on that element.”

“Yeah, so the key task for antitrust enforcers is to ensure that we have a marketplace where firms can compete on the merits. If you're an entrepreneur business, and you have an idea for particular good or service and you bring it to market and consumers like it, it's successful.”

“Amazon has massively - and I'm trying not to use this particular word, but I can't not use it here - disrupted the business model in publishing. Publishers used to be able to take risks with heavier books that might not be as popular, and they used to be able to subsidize them with best sellers.”

“I think we need to be very wary of systems where it's the public that is carrying the burden of doing cleanup.”

“When companies are actively directing their products or services at children or if those services are being used by children and they know, there are a set of privacy laws and privacy rules on the books that companies have to abide by. This is under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.”

“One reason why enforcers may not have scrutinised the impact of roll-ups previously is the relatively small size of each acquisition. Antitrust enforcement has traditionally focused on large deals between large companies.”

“We've identified not just one merger, but a whole string of mergers that some of these large companies made that we believe were illegal, that we believe were anti-competitive.”

“Amazon knows that a lot of small businesses live in constant terror of Amazon, because they know that with the press of a single button, a business can see its sales drop by 80% or 90%. Overnight a business can be looking at bankruptcy or liquidation if it gets on the wrong side of Amazon.”

“If we want a healthier, more diverse market - and more variety in our Halloween buckets - we could start by reviving some of our antitrust laws.”

“When Congress passed U.S. antitrust laws, lawmakers made them flexible precisely because they knew that they could not predict the constantly new and evolving ways in which firms can undermine free and fair competition.”

“I think we've seen all sorts of instances in which monopolies, once they become incumbents, are not incentivized to innovate in the same way. And so really it's about keeping the market open to new entry, to startups, to entrepreneurs. That's so important for innovation. And forcing the antitrust laws is really critical to that.”

“What we hear day-in, day-out is that people too often feel like they're not getting a fair shake in the market.”

“When you say something like, 'Well, there's a lot of visceral dislike of what our agency is doing,' I think you have to, first of all, figure out which are the voices that you're privileging and focusing on. We try to open our doors and make sure we are keeping the full country in mind, rather than people who have access to power.”

“I'm grateful that the FTC is viewed as a leader internationally and all credit goes to our terrific staff at the office of international affairs that, for many years now, have been insuring that we are sharing our experience and expertise around the world.”

“The expanding adoption of A.I. risks further locking in the market dominance of large incumbent technology firms. A handful of powerful businesses control the necessary raw materials that start-ups and other companies rely on to develop and deploy A.I. tools. This includes cloud services and computing power, as well as vast stores of data.”

“To go all the way back, lawmakers passed the antitrust laws because they wanted to favor competition over consolidation, the basic idea being that when businesses have to compete they generally produce better outcomes in terms of lower prices, better quality, better innovation.”

“Even in cases where you're not going to have a slam-dunk theory or a slam-dunk case, or there's risk involved, what do you do? Do you turn away? Or do you think that these are moments when we need to stand strong and move forward?”

“When you have companies that are not disciplined by competition, oftentimes they can get away with abusing their customers; firms can become too big to care.”

“To stay ahead globally, we don't need to protect our monopolies from innovation - we need to protect innovation from our monopolies.”