Lina Khan's Regulatory Ghost: Why Her FTC Legacy Is Still Shaping Tech Policy Debates in 2026
Lina Khan may have left Washington, but her policy fingerprints remain all over the legislative debates conservatives are now being warned to avoid. A pointed op-ed published April 29, 2026 is sounding the alarm: the regulatory philosophy that defined Khan's tenure as Federal Trade Commission Chair under President Biden hasn't died with the administration that created it. Instead, critics argue, it has migrated into pending federal legislation and state-level bills — and some conservatives are dangerously close to supporting it.
The debate cuts to something fundamental about how America regulates its most powerful technology companies, and whether the instinct to curb Big Tech's dominance crosses over into anti-competitive, anti-growth policy that ultimately punishes consumers and innovators alike. Understanding what Khan actually did — and why her critics are still invoking her name — requires looking at the full arc of her tenure, the bills now being debated, and what it means for the future of American tech regulation.
Who Is Lina Khan and What Did She Actually Do at the FTC?
Lina Khan became one of the most consequential — and controversial — regulatory officials of the Biden era. Appointed FTC Chair at just 32 years old, she arrived in Washington with an academic reputation built on challenging what she called the inadequacy of consumer welfare standards in modern antitrust law. Her 2017 Yale Law Journal article on Amazon was a landmark in neo-Brandeisian antitrust thinking, arguing that existing frameworks were ill-suited to platform economics where companies could undercut competitors while charging consumers nothing at all.
In practice, her FTC pursued an aggressive enforcement agenda. The commission challenged mergers that would previously have sailed through review, launched investigations into dominant platforms, and attempted to rewrite the rules governing how antitrust law applies to digital markets. She targeted Meta's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, attempted to block Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and pursued Amazon on multiple fronts.
Critics — and they were legion, spanning both parties — argued Khan's FTC overreached consistently, losing major cases in court and creating regulatory uncertainty that chilled investment. Supporters countered that she was doing exactly what the moment required: forcing courts and Congress to confront the question of whether 20th-century antitrust doctrine was adequate for 21st-century platform monopolies.
When the Biden administration ended, Khan departed along with Jonathan Kanter, the former Assistant Attorney General who led the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division in a similarly aggressive direction. Together, they represented what their detractors called an "anti-business team" — a coordinated effort to use regulatory power to reshape the technology sector's competitive landscape.
The Op-Ed Warning: "Bidenomics Reincarnate"
The April 2026 op-ed at the center of current discussion doesn't mince words. Its central argument is that with Khan and Kanter gone from their official posts, conservatives may be tempted to believe the regulatory threat to the tech sector has passed. That, the author argues, would be a serious mistake.
The piece attributes a portion of the inflation and slowed GDP growth during the Biden years directly to Khan's anti-business FTC policies — a claim that will be contested by economists who point to supply chain disruptions, pandemic spending, and global energy market dynamics as primary drivers. But the political argument is distinct from the economic one: the op-ed is less interested in assigning precise causal blame for macroeconomic conditions than in making the case that regulatory hostility toward large businesses creates a climate of uncertainty that depresses investment and growth.
More specifically, the op-ed targets the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), describing it as "a pipe dream of Khan and militant progressives like Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN)." The warning to conservative lawmakers is direct: supporting AICOA means carrying water for a regulatory philosophy that voters rejected when they ended the Biden era, and dressing it up as a conservative cause doesn't change what it actually is.
"Backing AICOA would mean conservatives adopting the anti-business regulatory framework that defined Bidenomics — just with a different party label attached."
What Is AICOA and Why Does It Matter?
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act has been circulating in various forms for several years. At its core, the bill targets "covered platforms" — large digital platforms like Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta — and prohibits them from using their platform position to advantage their own products and services over those of competitors who rely on the same platform.
Proponents argue this is straightforward fairness: Amazon shouldn't be able to use sales data from third-party sellers to inform its own competing products, and Apple shouldn't be able to make its own apps default in ways that disadvantage rivals. The logic is appealing: dominant platforms have structural advantages that pure competition cannot cure.
Opponents, including the current op-ed's author, counter that the "big is bad" mentality embedded in AICOA misidentifies the problem and would produce significant harm. Their argument runs roughly as follows:
- Consumers often prefer integrated platform experiences — Apple's tight hardware-software integration is a feature, not a bug, for millions of users.
- Prohibiting platforms from favoring their own services could degrade product quality and create artificial fragmentation.
- Enforcement would require constant regulatory intervention in product design decisions, substituting bureaucratic judgment for market signals.
- The innovation cost is real: companies uncertain about which integration decisions will trigger antitrust liability may avoid making beneficial improvements altogether.
What makes the current moment politically interesting is the strange-bedfellows dynamic AICOA has historically attracted. Some Republicans have expressed sympathy for the bill, motivated by hostility toward what they perceive as Big Tech's political biases and censorship of conservative voices. The op-ed is essentially an intervention against this impulse, arguing that using antitrust law as a cudgel against perceived political enemies is a game conservatives will lose, because they are handing regulatory weapons to a state apparatus that has historically been wielded against right-of-center interests.
California's BASED Act: A State-Level Front in the Same War
The federal debate has a state-level companion. California's BASED Act — introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener — represented an attempt to bring similar platform regulation to the country's largest state economy. Given California's role as home to most of the major technology companies AICOA targets, state-level regulation would have carried significant practical weight even without federal action.
The bill ultimately failed to make it out of committee, a setback that critics of expansive tech regulation are treating as a validation of their position. But the fact that it was introduced at all, and that it attracted serious legislative support, illustrates the broader point: the regulatory impulse Khan embodied didn't expire with her tenure. It has become embedded in a policy ecosystem that extends well beyond any single official's influence.
Sen. Wiener is a prominent figure in California technology policy, having shepherded significant legislation on AI, digital infrastructure, and platform regulation. His willingness to advance BASED Act reflects genuine conviction about the need for platform accountability — whatever its ultimate legislative fate.
The Broader Debate: Is "Big is Bad" a Coherent Framework?
The philosophical dispute at the heart of these debates deserves more serious engagement than it typically receives in political coverage. Both sides have real arguments.
The neo-Brandeisian case — named for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who was deeply suspicious of concentrated economic power — holds that large-scale concentration is harmful not just to consumers in a narrow price-and-output sense, but to democracy, innovation ecosystems, and worker bargaining power. Under this view, Amazon's low prices don't exonerate it from antitrust scrutiny, because the company's dominance over the e-commerce infrastructure that thousands of small businesses depend on represents a form of power that deserves independent scrutiny.
The traditional consumer welfare school counters that antitrust law is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer — it should intervene when identifiable consumer harm can be demonstrated, not on abstract concerns about size or power. Under this framework, breaking up a company that consumers love and that delivers lower prices is an active harm, not a neutral regulatory act.
Khan's FTC operated explicitly within the neo-Brandeisian framework, and the courts frequently pushed back. Several of the commission's highest-profile challenges failed in litigation, which critics cite as evidence that her approach was legally unsound. Supporters argue the losses reflect conservative judicial doctrine, not the inherent weakness of the theory.
What This Means: The Political Stakes for Conservatives
The op-ed's core warning reflects a genuine strategic dilemma within the Republican coalition. The populist wing of the party — increasingly dominant in recent cycles — has real grievances with Big Tech that aren't obviously addressed by a pure laissez-faire approach. If major platforms do systematically suppress conservative content, the argument goes, what does "free market" mean in practice for right-of-center political speech?
But the institutional conservative and business community position holds that antitrust is the wrong tool for this problem, and that conservatives who support AICOA are making a category error — using a policy instrument built for economic harm analysis to address what is fundamentally a speech and political bias question. If the concern is content moderation, address content moderation directly. Don't hand the administrative state a new regulatory lever over the tech sector on the theory that you'll control how it's used.
That last point is the crux. Regulatory authority doesn't stay with the party that creates it. A Republican administration that expands FTC power over technology platforms today creates an instrument that a future Democratic administration will wield differently. Conservatives who supported aggressive Khan-style antitrust enforcement because they wanted to hurt Google or Amazon today may find those same powers turned on different targets tomorrow.
This is the deeper argument the op-ed is making, and it's a serious one — even if the framing (attributing inflation primarily to FTC policy) overstates the case considerably.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did Lina Khan actually accomplish as FTC Chair?
Khan's FTC pursued an unprecedented volume of merger challenges and enforcement actions against major technology companies. She succeeded in reorienting the commission's philosophical approach and sparked a significant national debate about antitrust doctrine. In terms of courtroom wins, the record was mixed — several high-profile cases were lost or settled on unfavorable terms. Her supporters argue she planted seeds that will bear fruit over time; her critics argue the losses prove her approach was overreach.
What is AICOA and what would it actually do?
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would prohibit large digital platforms — generally defined as those with over 50 million US monthly active users and market caps above a certain threshold — from using their dominant platform positions to advantage their own products. This would affect practices like Amazon featuring its own brands in search results, Apple pre-installing its own apps, and Google prioritizing Google Maps in search. Supporters say it creates fair competition; opponents say it prohibits platform integration that consumers actually want.
Why are conservatives being warned away from supporting AICOA?
The argument, as made in the recent op-ed, is that AICOA embodies the anti-business, interventionist regulatory philosophy of the Khan era — and that conservatives who support it for tactical reasons (punishing politically biased tech companies) are handing the administrative state a new regulatory weapon that will ultimately be used in ways they don't control or intend.
Did California's BASED Act pass?
No. The BASED Act, introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener, failed to make it out of committee. However, its introduction signals ongoing appetite for platform regulation at the state level, independent of federal action.
Is there a viable alternative to AICOA for conservatives concerned about Big Tech?
Critics of AICOA who share conservative concerns about Big Tech generally favor more targeted approaches: direct legislation on content moderation transparency, Section 230 reform, or more narrowly scoped rules addressing specific demonstrated harms. The argument is that these approaches address the actual concerns without creating broad new regulatory authority over platform design decisions.
Conclusion: The Policy Battle Isn't Over
Lina Khan's departure from the FTC didn't end the debate she helped define — it clarified its next phase. The question is no longer whether her approach to antitrust will be pursued by the current administration; it won't. The question is whether the legislative vehicles built around her theory of the case can survive without the institutional support that created them, and whether politicians across party lines will find the arguments compelling enough to push them forward anyway.
The op-ed warning is a shot across the bow at conservatives who might find AICOA attractive for reasons that have nothing to do with its underlying economic theory. The political logic is understandable — if you're angry at Big Tech, bills that would constrain Big Tech are appealing regardless of their doctrinal origins. But the institutional argument against crossing that line is also coherent: regulatory power rarely stays bounded by the intentions of those who expand it.
Whatever one thinks of Khan's legacy — and reasonable people disagree sharply — the policy ecosystem she helped build is more durable than any single administration. That's the real story here: not one official's career, but the ongoing contest over whether American antitrust doctrine will be remade for the platform economy age, and who will control the tools if it is.
