Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan is taking on the world’s biggest technology companies — and losing. From a report: Khan failed Tuesday in her latest effort to block a big-tech deal when a federal judge denied her agency’s bid to block Microsoft from closing its purchase of videogame publisher Activision Blizzard. The FTC suffered a similar setback earlier this year when it tried to thwart Meta Platforms’ purchase of a virtual-reality gaming company. Khan, who gained prominence as a critic of Amazon, entered office in 2021 vowing to stiffen antitrust enforcement. Past enforcers were too cautious about bringing tough cases, she has said, and failed to confront the rise of companies such as Facebook owner Meta that gained monopoly-like power in digital industries, she said.
“I’m certainly not someone who thinks success is marked by a 100% court record,” Khan said last year in remarks at the University of Chicago. “If you just never bring those hard cases, I think there is severe cost to that, that can lead to stagnation and stasis.” Under the Biden administration, antitrust agencies have challenged more mergers than in previous years, including some that historically the government wouldn’t have tried to block. Microsoft and Activision aren’t head-to-head competitors, making the case against the deal less straightforward and more dependent on the FTC’s prediction that the combined company would abuse its power to hurt competition in the future.
