Lina Khan is an antitrust lawyer and scholar who served as Chair of the Federal Trade Commission from 2021 to 2025. Her 2017 Yale Law Journal article "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox" — written while she was still a law student — relaunched serious antitrust scholarship on platform monopolies and established her as the intellectual center of the neo-Brandeisian movement in competition policy.
"Amazon's Antitrust Paradox"
Khan's central argument in the 2017 article was that the consumer welfare standard — the dominant framework in US antitrust since Robert Bork's The Antitrust Paradox (1978) — was structurally incapable of capturing the harms Amazon's platform practices created. Amazon's business model deliberately sacrificed short-term profits to build market dominance, meaning that consumer prices often fell even as the company's competitive position became entrenched and predatory. Khan argued that antitrust law needed to return to its structural roots: examining market power and dominance itself, not just price effects on consumers.
This structural critique is foundational to chokepoint-capitalism as Doctorow and rebecca-giblin develop it. The mechanism they describe — platforms using chokehold positions to compress wages on one side while maintaining consumer prices on the other — cannot be seen through a consumer welfare lens. Khan's framework provides the legal theory for why platform-decay-cycle harms are real antitrust harms.
FTC under Khan
As FTC Chair, Khan pursued an aggressive enforcement agenda targeting tech platform mergers and practices, attempted (with mixed success in courts) to block acquisitions by Meta, Microsoft, and others, and worked with the Biden administration's broader antitrust revival alongside DOJ Antitrust Division chief Jonathan Kanter. The FTC also issued rules targeting non-compete agreements, junk fees, and surveillance advertising — issues that connect to Doctorow's concerns about switching-costs and coercive platform practices.
Doctorow has been an enthusiastic supporter of Khan's FTC, treating it as evidence that the policy arguments in the-internet-con and chokepoint-capitalism-book were achieving institutional traction. The end of the Biden administration and Khan's departure from the FTC in 2025 represent, in Doctorow's framing, a reversion toward regulatory capture.
Neo-Brandeis movement
Khan belongs to the neo-Brandeisian or "New Brandeis" movement in antitrust, which also includes matt-stoller, zephyr-teachout, Barry Lynn (who led the Open Markets Institute), and others. This network represents the policy community most aligned with Doctorow's own analysis. He engages with their work regularly in pluralistic-blog and positions his fiction and nonfiction as popular-audience supplements to their more technical policy arguments. the-internet-con can be read as the accessible companion to Khan, Stoller, and Teachout's more legalistic work.
Relationship to Doctorow
Khan and Doctorow share a diagnosis and a policy agenda but operate in different registers — she in formal antitrust law and regulatory action, he in popular writing and fiction. Doctorow's contribution to the shared project is reaching audiences that law review articles and FTC rulemakings do not. They are allies in an intellectual and political coalition rather than direct collaborators.