The stinging defeat that Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan suffered last week in her antitrust fight against Microsoft is emboldening critics to suggest her war against Big Tech is misguided and doomed to fail.
At the root of the criticisms is the 34-year-old academic’s “sue, don’t settle strategy.” Rather than negotiate consent degrees that might require merger partners to divest certain businesses or make other concessions to blunt potentially anticompetitive aspects of deals, Khan favors taking disputes to court, a go-for-broke strategy ultimately aimed at getting courts to adopt a more expansive view of what constitutes anticompetitive corporate behavior.
