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Lina Khan’s FTC Played Right into China’s Hands. It’s Time to Get Serious About Tech Competition.

Under the Biden administration, Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan and the Department of Justice (DOJ)’s antitrust lead Jonathan Kanter waged an ideological crusade against America’s most successful tech firms. Under the guise of “fairness,” they advanced a regulatory agenda that weakened U.S. companies just as global competition—especially from China—heated up. Now, as Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek makes headlines for its cutting-edge model, it’s clear that the American government’s focus should have been on maintaining and strengthening its technological edge, not tearing down its most innovative companies.

The timing of the FTC’s actions could hardly have been worse. Just as AI is proving to be the defining battleground of the next economic era, Khan’s FTC prioritized blocking domestic innovation and attacking American businesses like Amazon, NVIDIA, OpenAI and Meta. At the DOJ, Kanter waged his own war against Apple and Google. The result? U.S. tech was forced to spend more time in courtrooms fighting frivolous lawsuits and less time focused on serving their customers and outpacing China.

A clear and recent example is the FTC’s decision to consult Chinese e-commerce giant Temu to elicit their help to go after Amazon for its pricing policies. That’s right: the U.S. government sought input from a major Chinese competitor on how to regulate American firms. 

Then, there’s the FTC’s successful sabotage of Amazon’s acquisition of iRobot. Progressives claimed, without evidence, that the deal would harm competition and even floated conspiracy theories about Roombas spying on American households. Unfortunately, their crusade against the Amazon-iRobot merger was successful. This led iRobot to cut 31% of its workforce and offshore engineering jobs. And who was the main beneficiary of the FTC’s attack on the Amazon-iRobot merger? Chinese manufacturers that were eager to fill the void

The DOJ’s antitrust division, led by Kanter, has similarly been driven to break up U.S. tech leaders with no thought to the impact on consumers or American competitiveness. Apple and Google make up a sizable portion of the most innovative tech industry in the world, leading advancements in frontier advancements like AI and quantum computing.

Yet, instead of championing them as national assets in the race against China, the Biden administration chose to kneecap them with costly, drawn-out lawsuits. While Google fights off government-mandated breakups and Apple faces antitrust litigation for offering an integrated and secure ecosystem, we can only speculate what innovations could have taken place if not for the time and resources wasted on a progressive antitrust crusade.

Under Biden, the message from Washington was that too much innovation and too much success would put a target on your back. Such self-sabotage happened at the worst possible time, and unless the U.S. shifts gears, we risk ceding our global tech leadership. With a new administration taking over, it’s time for a course correction at the DOJ and FTC. The U.S. government must abandon the misguided war on its own tech sector and focus on the real challenge: outpacing China in AI, robotics and next-generation industries. That means:

  • Ending politically motivated lawsuits against U.S. tech firms and refocusing antitrust enforcement on actual consumer harm, not progressive theories of fairness;
  • Encouraging, not blocking, domestic innovation by allowing successful firms to scale and compete on the global stage; and
  • Strengthening U.S. leadership in AI and emerging tech by ensuring regulatory policies support, rather than hinder, technological advancement.

Under Biden, Lina Khan’s FTC and Kanter’s DOJ prioritized punishing American success over protecting American competitiveness. That era must end. 

The U.S. cannot afford to be its own worst enemy in the tech race. It’s time to start playing to win.