In a groundbreaking 2017 Yale Law Journal study, “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” the legal scholar Lina Khan sized up the online giant.

“Amazon is the titan of twenty-first century commerce,” she wrote. “In addition to being a retailer, it is now a marketing platform, a delivery and logistics network, a payment service, a credit lender, an auction house, a major book publisher, a producer of television and films, a fashion designer, a hardware manufacturer, and a leading host of cloud server space.”

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Khan, thirty-two, was born in London to Pakistani parents and migrated with them to the United States when she was eleven years old. She is a former Columbia law professor who also served as legal director for the Open Markets Institute, a political advocacy group. She is the youngest person to be appointed FTC chair.

The FTC was established by President Woodrow Wilson in 1914. But since the 1980s, under the presidency of Ronald Reagan, it has—in the words of Matt Stoller from the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly group—been “defanged,” to the point where “economists [are] in charge and made it an agent of monopolists.”

“I agree with Matt,” Sascha Meinrath of Penn State University told The Progressive. Reagan is an inflection point promoting the deregulatory era. The FTC adopted a policy to not “unduly burden legitimate business and everything else—fostering competition, consumer protection±—became subservient to it.”

For decades, the FTC operated under a “consumer welfare standard,” focusing on anti-competitive practices that harmed consumers (i.e., pricing practices). “The Big Tech giants are all creations of those shifts,” Stoller told Politico. “What Lina is doing is going back to the pre-1980s model.”