Charged with enforcing antitrust law and promoting consumer protection, the FTC is nominally the regulator charged with stopping deals that will harm consumers. But under successive administrations – Republican and Democratic – some critics charge the FTC stood by as industry after industry consolidated power in the hands of fewer and fewer companies.

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Khan is “probably the best leader the FTC’s ever had”, argued Matt Stoller, director of research at the American Economic Liberties Project, and a former colleague. “That doesn’t mean she will succeed, or fail. But she’s really stretching all of their resources and trying to use the authority they’ve been granted to fulfill the mission they’ve been charged with.”

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“Economists had these models, and that’s how we viewed the world,” said Stoller. “Lina just talked to business people and was like: ‘What’s going on? How does this market actually work?’ What she found is something that is not in the models, which is power.”

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