Vance says FTC’s Lina Khan doing ‘pretty good job,’ in break with GOP

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) separated himself from his Republican colleagues by expressing his support for Federal Trade Commission Chairwoman Lina Khan, whose approach to antitrust has been criticized by the GOP.

Vance appeared at RemedyFest, an antitrust conference organized by Y Combinator and Bloomberg, on Tuesday alongside Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Khan. There, he spoke out in favor of Khan, who has been the target of Republicans over her abandonment of the consumer welfare standard that guided U.S. antitrust policy for decades in favor of a much more skeptical approach that also considers other factors, such as corporate concentration and income inequality.

“A lot of my Republican colleagues look at [Khan] … and they say, ‘[Khan] is engaged in some sort of fundamentally evil thing,’” Vance told attendees. “I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration who I think is doing a pretty good job.”

Vance made news on Friday when he posted on X that he wanted to break up Google after its generative AI model mixed up the races of historical figures. “Long overdue, but it’s time to break Google up,” the Ohio Republican wrote. “This matters far more than any other election integrity issue. The monopolistic control of information in our society resides with an explicitly progressive technology company.”

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Khan has aggressively sought to regulate mergers and acquisitions. In some cases, she attempted to block major company mergers, such as Microsoft’s purchase of Call of Duty developer Activision Blizzard and Meta’s acquisition of the VR fitness app developer Within, only for her cases to fail in court.

House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-KY) and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) have both focused on Khan in the last year, sending several subpoenas to acquire information about the agency’s practices and inquiring about her plans and interactions with the European Union.

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