Lina Khan

“It's no surprise to me personally that monopolists, and executives associated with monopolies, would prefer that the anti-monopoly cops just go away. But that's not the job that we've been given.”

“I'll say, as a general matter, we follow the facts where they take us. And there are certainly matters, when they first hit my desk sometimes, they might not stand out as, this is definitely something we should do.”

“Economic liberty, not just political liberty, is at the heart of the American experiment. You're not really free if you don't have the right to switch jobs or choose what to do with your labor.”

“Start-ups are historically a key driver of job creation and innovation, but several studies have found that noncompetes reduce entrepreneurship and start-up formation. How can a new business break into the market if all of the qualified workers are locked in? Or if the would-be founder is bound by a noncompete?”

“There's no doubt that the latitude one has as a scholar, critiquing certain approaches, is very different from being in the position of actually executing.”

“The trajectory of the Web 2.0 era was not inevitable - it was instead shaped by a broad range of policy choices.”

“I think a system where you're putting the burden on, under-resourced civil society groups, under-resourced academics, under-resourced public servants, is just going to create a system where you're endlessly doing cleanup rather than addressing things on the front end by the actors that are best positioned to do that.”

“The FTC Act prohibits unfair or deceptive practices, and Congress didn't create a closed list or say that only applies to some technologies and not others. It really applies across the board. And that's why the FTC has now, for many years, been the frontline enforcer of strong privacy laws.”

“I got my start as a journalist, talking to actual market participants.”

“The long-term interests of consumers include product quality, variety and innovation - factors best promoted through both a robust competitive process and open markets.”

“Unless you're willing to move hundreds of miles away or take a huge pay cut to restart your career from scratch, a noncompete can effectively lock you into a job. That's a clear restriction of individual liberty.”

“The FTC was actually created more than a century ago, in the era of the robber barons and the industrial trust and Standard Oil, to really take on concentrated economic power and the monopolies that Congress worried were squeezing small business and hurting consumers.”

“Like many across government, the FTC is watching closely as the release of sophisticated AI tools creates both opportunities and risks.”

“It's incredible, once you start studying industry structure and see how much consolidation there has been across industries - in airlines, contact-lens solution, funeral caskets. Every nook and cranny of our economy has consolidated.”

“The ways PE firms are making serial acquisitions, each individual acquisition is under the radar, but in aggregate they roll up the whole market.”

“As a law enforcer, one of the things that I think most about is deterrence. You really want to ensure that firms are not engaging in illegal behavior in the first instance.”

“Even when services are good for consumers, they can hurt a whole set of other interests - be it workers, be it business formation, be it democracy at large.”

“Noncompetes are the type of restriction that Section 5 of the F.T.C. Act, a federal law passed by Congress more than a century ago, is supposed to prevent.”

“We heard from employees who, because of noncompetes, were stuck in abusive workplaces.”

“For most people, their everyday interaction with power is not with their representative in Congress, but with their boss. And if in your day-to-day life you're treated like a serf in your economic relationships, what does that mean for your civic capabilities - for your experience of democracy?”