DURING THE DEMOCRATIC presidential primary, several candidatesmade antitrust enforcement against Big Tech part of their campaign pitch. Joe Biden was not one of them. When he won the nomination, and ultimately the presidency, Silicon Valley executives probably felt as if they had dodged a bullet. If so, they appear to have been mistaken.

On Tuesday morning, Politico reported that Biden plans to nominate the legal academic Lina Khan to an open seat on the Federal Trade Commission, one of the agencies with the most power to enforce antitrust laws. Khan is at the vanguard of the Big Tech antitrust movement. In January 2017, while still a student at Yale Law School, she became an overnight academic celebrity with the publication of a papertitled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” which both took aim at Amazon’s anticompetitive behavior and delivered a powerful critique of the antitrust establishment. Last year, as a staffer on the House antitrust subcommittee, she was a key figure behind the landmark investigationinto Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Apple. Now, Khan is on the verge of becoming part of a new antitrust establishment. (Disclosure: Khan and I went to law school together and have remained friendly. On the other hand, she didn’t reply to my request for comment.)

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Meanwhile, although the president has yet to name the head of the Department of Justice antitrust division, the Biden administration is quietly being stocked with people who have ties to the new anti-monopoly push—sometimes referred to as the New Brandeis movement or, more derisively, hipster antitrust. His transition team included Sarah Miller, a former Open Markets employee who now runs another anti-monopoly group, the American Economic Liberties Project. Antitrust hipsters are beginning to dot agencies like the Office of Management and Budget and the Department of Agriculture. Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, was senior policy adviser to the Clinton campaign, where he helped inject some antitrust ideas. If it goes through, Khan’s elevation to the FTC would not trigger an ideological shift on antitrust so much as reflect one that has already taken place.