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Lina Khan: The 32-year-old taking on Big Tech
- gigatexal 5y agoWhy does her age matter?
- bittercynic 5y agoSome might take her young age to mean she's less likely to have already been bought by the companies they'd like her to reign in.
- jedberg 5y agoTo the contrary, a young person has a long career ahead of them, and a less scrupulous person could be bribed by the promise of a lifetime cushy job after government.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- towergratis 5y agoExperience and maturity matters. When I was young I too thought I knew all I needed to know. The older I get the more I understand that experience is very important.
- kilbuz 5y agoIn both cases, young and old seem to believe what is in their self-interest.
- towergratis 5y agoMy comment was on older-self vs younger-self. It's not in your "self-interest", the way you mean it, to review your ideas and believes from when you were younger and realize that with your extra experience you see things differently now. And just to be 100% clear, I am all for having younger people in critical positions and don't try to argue that one is better than the other. My reply was on how age matters. Don't know why you try to twist it to a generational flame-war.
- jollybean 5y agoOne has the advantage of having been in both situations.
- o0-0o 5y agoI often think about the old parable about a man walking down a road that comes to a fence. There is another man on the other side. He asks him to open the gate, and the man replies, "I'll open the gate if you can tell me why the fence is here".
- kwhitefoot 5y agoChesterton's fence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_fence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G._K._Chesterton#Chesterton's_...
- standardUser 5y agoWhat matters more is recognizing the grand variance of human experience, and that while some may take a lifetime to accumulate even a little wisdom, others can possess unusual abilities and perspectives at any age. It's not like this is news, history is full of such young figures.
- towergratis 5y agoCompletely, but it is still worth mentioning the age. I don't know why people get triggered by it. It's like saying the 16yo chess champion, or the 18yo self made billionaire
- gigatexal 5y agoRead her paper on Amazon.
- twalla 5y agoIn this context it’s because she’s the youngest person to hold the position of FTC Chairperson.
- gigatexal 5y agolook at her work. Her work is what brought her to the forefront. Automatically assuming being overly ideal just by way of being young is whist at best and dumb at worst.
- tenpies 5y agoBecause in general it's a very good indicator of idealism vs pragmatism. Obviously not a be-all, and highly dependent on experience (e.g. are you 32 and spent all your life in academia, or 32 and have 10 years of industry experience, or somewhere in between). You can also make a myriad of applicable observations based on age, but ultimately it's probably relevant because she is the youngest person in that position ever.
- slaughtr 5y agoI'd say in this case it's an indication of her likely familiarity/experience with some of the issues she'll work on in the FTC - particularly "Big Tech" as the article calls out. Less likely to ask Google how an ad showed up on their kid's iPhone, for example.
- oh_sigh 5y agoYoung people are probably better at manipulating phones than their elders, but do they actually have a better understanding of what is happening? Pointless anecdote, but my friend, who is a well educated non-tech white collar professional in their upper 20s who is very active on tiktok/IG, recently let on that they believed cell phones communicated directly with satellites. I asked them why they thought dead zones existed in the countryside, and they said that was probably because there wasn't a satellite overhead. I asked them why they thought they were called "cellular phones", and after a minute of pondering it must be because the phones are very small.
- InitialLastName 5y agoIt isn't totally wrong to surmise that cell phones communicate directly with satellites; Mine is constantly listening to radio streams from satellites and using those to figure out where I am.
- ZephyrBlu 5y agoI'd say it's pretty wrong considering there are literally satellite phones.
- InitialLastName 5y agoOh, it's for sure pretty wrong, but I can see how someone would get that impression (especially if they knew satellite phones were a thing but didn't know how uncommon they are).
- rvz 5y agoIt really doesn't and who cares. The source of this article is from the BBC and they and every clickbait tabloid media company does it all the time. What really matters is if she and her assistants can do anything about the Big Tech problem or not. Otherwise it's a huge waste of time and nothing happens.
- ASpaceCowboi 5y agoshe is amazing. I can't wait to see what she does.
- elefanten 5y agoCan you elaborate or expand on this? What was particularly novel or interesting about her Amazon Anti-trust Paradox article? Or work since then? Genuine question. I've primarily seen vague praise of the anti-trust stance (no specifics) and fawning/consternation over her age.
- tschellenbach 5y agoIt's weird how they focus on big tech while ignoring banking, ISPs, healthcare, education, real estate, utilities and many others. Lot of markets that could use more competition.
- jedberg 5y agoBig tech is just the most visible thing to people right now. Just like oil and steel and telecom were when those were broken up (and incidentally breaking those up didn't seem to last).
- azinman2 5y agoThat’s exactly my thought. Except, in many of these cases it’s simply too late. In particular for retail, go to much of the country and the only options for restaurants, grocery, clothing, etc are national chains. Many of these areas just have a Walmart and that’s it. Fast food dominates (along with its hazards). Nothing was done to prevent this, which has been draining local economies for years, and now all the local competition is literally gone.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- endisneigh 5y agohonestly I hear this a lot - why does it matter? do you think the government isn't working on those other things as well? misdirection must be the most effective strategy of all time. in an alternate universe this would be "Lina Khan: The 32-year-old taking on ISPs" and there would be an identical comment to yours lamenting why Big Tech isn't being investigated
- threatofrain 5y agoYes, they aren't. The ISP game is over.
- endisneigh 5y agolol, this is not true. The American Jobs Act introduced by Biden explicitly calls out the ISP issue and tries to allow co-ops, municipalities and utilities to compete with local ISPs. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/31/fact-sheet-the-american-jobs-plan/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases... even if they were not, it's still irrelevant to the issue of Big Tech. people can resolve issues sequentially.
- CalChris 5y agoI'm using this as an excuse to read through her Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox Yale Law Journal article as it just became more important. Before I might have read it as a dissent; there are lots of dissents. Now as FTC Chair, she has a seat at the table. https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-parado...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nabla9 5y agoBetter place to start is a review article from Lina Khan wrote that explains the new New Brandeis Movement. The New Brandeis Movement: America’s Antimonopoly Debate by Lina Khan https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/article/9/3/131/4915966 https://academic.oup.com/jeclap/article/9/3/131/4915966 (US moved into Borkian antitrust principles in the Reagan era, New Braindeis Movement moves is correction to more conventional view of antitrust)
- oh_sigh 5y agoEconomists: Was "Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox" really as big of a deal as the reporting says? As someone who doesn't know much about economics, I never assumed that a monopoly would be merely defined as a cost-based analysis of corporate products. I assumed basically what the paper was arguing was how the system worked - you can be a monopoly even while providing the lowest cost to consumers.
- huitzitziltzin 5y agoThis is my field. I read the article some years ago and looked over parts of it again yesterday. I was and remain _extremely unimpressed_. I do not think the article had much of any influence on the thinking of economists on the issues it covers. I have never heard it discussed or mentioned in an economics seminar, nor is it taught. There are economists in industrial organization who think big tech firms need a different regulatory approach. This is fair. But this opinion is not generally informed by khan’s arguments. In my opinion, you can make the case for regulating tech firms most easily for Facebook (which acquired competitors WhatsApp and Instagram and probably shouldn’t have been allowed to). The big tech firms have also done things occasionally which are clearly anticompetitive. Google and Facebook had a (recently revealed) secret anticompetitive agreement about bidding on ads, for example. That was a clear antitrust violation. Likely Google’s payment to Apple to remain the default search engine on iOS is at least questionable. I say all of this to illustrate that I’m not a skeptic about regulating tech firms vis antitrust law. However, the firm where I think this is hardest is Amazon. I don’t see them as being too large or too dominant. As of 2019 Walmart did about 3 times as much retail business as Amazon, iirc. Amazon faces competition from Walmart, Target, and any firm who sells a product online. The cost of going to a competitor’s website is zero. If consumers are repeatedly buying from Amazon instead, that’s a sign that Amazon is doing something right. The claim is made here frequently that AWS is a monopoly. That is very hard to square with the existence of serious competitors like Microsoft and Google. To respond to one more of your points: if you achieve a near monopoly by offering lower prices we economists would say that is good! Quantities are high and prices are low. You are a better option than your competitors. Khan seems to think that this is somehow bad for consumers, perhaps bc “eventually” Amazon will raise prices. (This is not remotely plausible.) If you want a vastly, VASTLY better take on modern antitrust which includes good discussion of tech firms and dominant platforms, read “the antitrust paradigm” by jonathan baker.
- DenverCode 5y agoWhat does the breakup of a big company such as Amazon or Google look like from the inside? How do they manage teams, products, etc?
- jollybean 5y agoI don't understand how someone so young is made responsible for such things. They'll have possibly never even managed 5 people, let alone large organizations. She's a Associate Law prof barely out of school. If they are 'brilliant' - that's great - then the should be senior advisors to the Head of the Commission, not Head of the Commission. We don't want theoretical ideologues in those kinds of positions. We ended up with companies like Facebook partly because we put 'really young people in enormous positions of power'. These kinds of jobs is also as much about politics, people, relationships and 'knowing the system' as they are 'being brilliant'. At my age, I'm keenly aware at how I was not ready for a whole bunch of things 10 years ago. Experience is real, just just 'an age'. Edit: responding to the commentor below, yes thanks I should have added, at age 32 you're not tangled up in a web of politics. Also what's hard to describe is that the wager and risk becomes much great as you go on. At 32, you have your life ahead of you, you can burn political capital. At 50, you have to absolutely be making sure you're either 1) keeping your job a long time or 2) making a major transition, enabled by doing favours, political things etc. - you have your retirement, a spouse and 3 kids all going to Uni to worry about. That mental state is an advantage. But again, the skills you start to gain after age 32 matter a lot and that someone who's brilliant like this is much better able to help as a senior adviser to someone with the organizational political skills.
- nabla9 5y agoSince graduating she has worked as Legal director at the Open Markets Institute, became Columbia Law School academic fellow, a Legal Fellow at the FTC, counsel to the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law (leading the congressional investigation) and published The Separation of Platforms and Commerce.
- keyanp 5y agoWhile I think there is some validity in your point. I also think there is value in sometimes bringing in someone young and without the years of baggage/relationships that morph their views and may also leave them with "favors" they need to return once in power. I can't see an industry veteran being willing to make such drastic changes without worrying about who they would offend.
- ceilingcorner 5y agoIt is normal for someone so young to be put in a high position of power purely to address one issue? (Tech monopolies) From what I understand, Ms. Khan wrote some influential papers against tech monopolies. Congress, wanting to address these monopolies, put her in charge of the FTC purely for this reason, as she has very little experience in anything I would assume to be necessary for running a massive government office. It seems odd to me, but I don’t really follow the FTC. Am I just being cynical? I don’t get this move and it feels very one-dimensional to me.
- spoonjim 5y agoAmerican politics is a sequence of issues left to fester followed by severe overreactions.
- lucasmullens 5y ago32 doesn't seem "so young" to me, given that you only need to be 35 to be president.
- crackercrews 5y agoThat is an interesting comparison in theory only; in reality, the youngest president elected was 42 (JFK). The median age at inauguration is 55. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_age#:~:text=The%20youngest%20person%20to%20assume,was%20inaugurated%20at%20age%2043 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit....
- kelnos 5y agoWhat was life expectancy back in 1776? A quick search suggests 54 for men. As the sibling notes, the current median age for a US president at inauguration is 55. Most people weren't expected to even live to 55 back then. (Although, you can make the argument that life expectancy figures can be skewed downward by high infant mortality to the point where they're not that useful a measure anymore.)
- indrax 5y agoMark Zuckerberg is 37. How are we deciding who has power? Is he the right person for that massive office?
- Proven 5y agoYoung, incompetent, and ideoligically blinded. Let's go!