by bnsn | 2026-03-01 16:21:44+00:00
reviewed by The New York Times, but because his "lack of collegiality" was imperiling the organization as a whole. The episode called to mind an email that Slaughter had sent him a year earlier, in 2016, in the run-up to a well-received conference on the market dominance of Google, Amazon, and Face-book, which Lynn had organized. Apparently, Slaughter indicated, Google was concerned that its position wouldn't be represented. "We are in the process of trying to expand our relationship with Google on some absolutely key points," Slaughter wrote to Lynn. She urged him to "just THINK about how you are imperiling funding for others."
Lynn was eventually pushed out of the think tank (both Google and Slaughter deny this was due to Schmidt's pres-sure) and ended up starting what has become an even more influential stand-alone think tank, the Open Markets Institute (full disclosure: I sit on the advisory board of the new entity) And his concerns about Big Tech's monopoly power have come to the forefront of the policy conversation in Washing-ton, influencing liberals and conservatives alike. One of the most influential pieces of work associated with the think tank was by a young legal scholar named Lina Khan, whose paper,
"Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," published in January 2017 by the Yale Law Journal, laid out why the old ways of thinking about monopoly power are no longer adequate for the digital era. (Khan worked with Open Markets for two years before law school and a year afterward as well.)
It's hard to believe that Khan, an unassuming thirty-year-old scholar, working in the long-neglected field of antitrust law, is currently public enemy number one for the world's tech titans (or perhaps number two, just behind EU competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager, who has taken some of Khan's ideas on board). Khan's breakthrough came from her
"interest in the economists who were actually studying pow-er....That's something that gets channeled out in the contemporary version of economics," she said during an interview with me in 2019.
Academic papers don't tend to go viral, but this one received a near-unprecedented level of interest from policy makers. In fewer than one hundred pages, Khan made the case that current interpretations of U.S. antitrust law, which is meant to regulate competition and curb monopolistic prac-tices, are utterly unsuited to the architecture of the modern economy.
For roughly four decades, antitrust scholars—taking their lead from Robert Bork's 1978 book The Antitrust Paradox-have pegged their definitions of monopoly power to short-term price effects; so if Amazon is making prices lower for con-sumers, the market must be working effectively. Khan set out a simple but powerful counterargument: that it doesn't matter if companies such as Amazon are making things cheaper in dollars if they are using predatory pricing strategies to dominate multiple industries and choke off competition and choice.
"I was fascinated by Wall Street's view of Amazon, and how much it differed from what conventional economic theory would say about the company," Khan said
Her reframing of the problem was revelatory, and is now at the core of a number of Big Tech antitrust actions on both