Federal trade commissioners don’t usually make national headlines. But on Tuesday, upon being confirmed 69 to 28 by the Senate and immediately sworn in as the agency’s chair, the confirmation of Lina Khan spawned news alerts that had phones rattling all over the country.

At 32, Khan is the youngest member to join – and lead – the FTC, which is tasked with the dual mission of protecting consumers and promoting competition in the marketplace. As a notable critic of concentrated economic power, her confirmation is designed specifically to guide the agency toward more aggressive enforcement.

 This is especially true in the area of Big Tech, where Khan made her name as a Yale Law student in 2017, authoring a paper called Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox.” The paper suggested that the jurisprudential consensus in America’s antitrust law was insufficient to tackle the concentrated growth in the digital economy, and that Amazon’s retail business should be separated from its selling platform.

So entrenched was the legal community toward an extremely narrow interpretation of the antitrust statutes — to the point that broad enforcement is extremely rare, and potential per se violations of the law are difficult to prosecute, particularly in digital markets — that Khan’s paper was tantamount to the shot heard ’round the staid, well-heeled world of American antitrust. Shortly thereafter, Khan went on to play a lead role for House Democrats in conducting a 16-month investigation into the market behaviors of Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook.

Khan’s tenure comes at an auspicious time for the world’s largest tech firms, which are facing national concern about the scale of their power, and a growing cross-party consensus urgently hoping to do something about it.

Last week, the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee introduced five bipartisan bills aimed at addressing critical areas of uncompetitive entrenchment by the country’s largest tech companies. The Department of Justice and 50 attorneys general (AGs) are leading an antitrust lawsuit against Google, while 46 state AGs have joined the FTC in a case against Facebook.

 Ohio’s attorney general recently filed a lawsuit claiming Google should be a public utility, and a similar argument is being made in separate legislative proposals from two U.S. senators, one of whom is the lead Republican on the Senate Commerce Committee. The New York Senate just passed a bill to update the state’s antitrust laws, and Florida has a new law prohibiting tech platforms from banning political candidates and giving citizens a private right of action. In the U.S. Senate, everyone from Josh Hawley to Amy Klobuchar to Mike Lee agrees the status quo in federal antitrust enforcement is not working. To read more click here