Word that the White House plans to pick Lina Khan, a Columbia Law professor whose research has spurred a rethinking of competition law, for a seat on the Federal Trade Commission has Washington and business types speculating that the Biden administration is preparing to get tough on antitrust. (She would need to be confirmed by the Senate.)

Ms. Khan first shot to fame with a paper she wrote in law school,accusing Amazon of abusing its monopoly power. Having previously worked at the anti-monopolist nonprofit Open Markets Institute, she has since become a leader in the progressive movement known as “hipster antitrust.” That movement calls for new ways of reviewing companies’ market control, including how that affects people’s roles as citizens, workers and community members in addition to being consumers.

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Proponents of Ms. Khan praised the prospect of her nomination:

• “Lina is the excellent and obvious choice for this moment,” Sarah Miller, the head of the nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, told DealBook. She added that Ms. Khan’s scholarship had challenged “antitrust orthodoxy,” making her potential addition to the F.T.C. a big opportunity for bolder thinking.

• Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law professor who supports tough antitrust policies, said that Ms. Khan — and her Columbia Law colleague, Tim Wu, who was recently named to the National Economic Council — were “two extraordinary, powerful choices” that give “hope that the last 40 years of consumer welfarism in antitrust could be on its last legs.”