from Hacker News

Lina Khan: The 32-year-old taking on Big Tech

by theklub on 6/16/21, 6:01 PM with 69 comments

• by ceilingcorner on 6/16/21, 6:55 PM

  It 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.

• by jollybean on 6/16/21, 6:47 PM

  I 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.

• by CalChris on 6/16/21, 6:31 PM

  I'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-parado...

• by oh_sigh on 6/16/21, 6:45 PM

  Economists: 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.

• by DenverCode on 6/16/21, 6:47 PM

  What does the breakup of a big company such as Amazon or Google look like from the inside? How do they manage teams, products, etc?

• by tschellenbach on 6/16/21, 6:26 PM

  It'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.

• by gigatexal on 6/16/21, 6:17 PM

  Why does her age matter?

• by ASpaceCowboi on 6/16/21, 6:24 PM

  she is amazing. I can't wait to see what she does.