Lina Khan, who led an aggressive antitrust movement against Big Tech the past few years, is out as chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
Her would-be successor, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee Andrew Ferguson, is a Republican member of the agency and former clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who has vowed to focus on ending Big Tech’s “vendetta against competition” and ensure America is the “world’s technological leader.”
Trump touted Ferguson’s “proven record of standing up to Big tech censorship and protecting Freedom of Speech” in a statement posted to Trump’s Truth Social late Monday. Ferguson will be “the most America First, and pro-innovation FTC Chair in our Country’s History,” Trump wrote in another post on Tuesday.
Since she started as chair in 2021, Khan was a lightning rod of criticism in Silicon Valley for throttling merger-and-acquisition activity through lawsuits, as well as overseeing antitrust investigations into long-time nemesis Amazon.com Inc., NVIDIA Corp., Microsoft Corp. and OpenAI.
Trump also nominated Gail Slater as assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice to lead antitrust.
But with the incoming Trump administration and advisers teeming with tech executives like Tesla Inc. CEO Elon Musk, venture capitalists David Sacks and Marc Andreessen, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison and PayPal member Peter Thiel, analysts and government observers expect a market ruled by a laissez faire stance toward deregulation and unfettered M&A activity.
“In our decades of covering tech stocks, the ‘Friday the 13th horror show’ for the tech world that Khan has become over the years is now over,” Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives said in a note to investors on Wednesday. “(This) means deal-making in the tech world is about to significantly increase heading into 2025.”
“We expect the strong to get stronger as Mag 7 gets the engines started up again on M&A with Microsoft, Oracle, Alphabet, Amazon and Tesla set to accelerate deals to expand their technology moat,” Ives wrote.
Indeed, shares of Alphabet hit a record high after Trump tapped Ferguson.
Neil Chilson, former FTC chief technologist and current head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, said the departure of Khan will allow the tech industry to “move on from expensive and overreaching progressive attempts to reshape the entire economy through botched antitrust.”
“The American people want honest businesses, lower prices, better products and services, and vibrant innovation. A revived FTC can and should help the U.S. achieve these goals,” Chilson added.
It remains unclear, however, whether change at the top of the FTC will translate to current Justice Department lawsuits against Google, and a possible investigation of Apple Inc. DoJ officials are seeking splitting off its Chrome browser and Android operating system from the Alphabet universe in a court battle that could last years.
