JD Vance's Antitrust Agenda Threatens Humanity's Technological Future
The Vice President's praise of Lina Khan makes his threats against big tech far more serious.
During his latest appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience, a nearly 3-hour interview released earlier this week, JD Vance laid out what policies he would prioritize if he were setting policy. As US Vice President he does not set the agenda of the current administration, but he does have the ear of the President as well as other significant forms of influence. Also, he is currently considered by far the most likely Republican presidential nominee for 2028 (Polymarket has him in first place at 41 percent and has Marco Rubio in second place at 27 percent). His policy priorities are therefore highly relevant.
He brought up only two policy areas, mentioning them each repeatedly throughout the last half hour of the interview. One of them is the empowerment of labor unions to negotiate more effectively with corporations. The other is the use of antitrust law to more aggressively attack big technology companies.
Vance explains during one of his multiple mentions of antitrust:
I think antitrust is a huge piece of the story. Now, it’s a little early with AI because we don’t yet know which companies are dominant, but I think one of the big mistakes, man, we made in the early 2000s is we should have gone after the big tech companies with antitrust. There is a trustbusting mechanism that exists in the US government. We just didn’t use it. We’re going to have to be willing to use it in the 21st century.
To understand the truly destructive nature of his embrace of antitrust, and to understand how he would likely try to use antitrust law to effectuate his vision if given the chance, an examination of one of his favorite federal bureaucrats is in order.
Lina Khan and JD Vance
Former FTC Chair Lina Khan is a radical antitrust lawyer who earned a Juris Doctor degree from Yale Law School in 2017 (Vance had earned the same degree from the same school five years earlier). Khan was appointed Chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by President Joe Biden in 2021. She held the position until President Donald Trump took office and replaced her with Andrew Ferguson in 2025. But JD Vance has repeatedly expressed admiration for her and her antitrust agenda, which redefines the purpose and nature of antitrust to radically expand its power over private business.
“A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lina Khan … and they say, ‘well Lina Khan is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamental evil thing,” Vance said in February 2024, commenting on her aggression against big tech companies. “And I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.”
In August 2024 he said, “Well, look, I don't agree with Lina Khan on every issue, to be clear, but I think that she's been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolize what we're allowed to say in our own country.”
So what exactly is the Lina Khan antitrust agenda?
Rejecting Consumer Welfare
Throughout much of the history of antitrust legislation in the United States, its stated purpose has been to protect consumers from corporations gaining monopoly powers over the prices and quality of goods and services.
“Courts have applied the antitrust laws to changing markets, from a time of horse and buggies to the present digital age,” explains the Federal Trade Commission in a publication at ftc.gov. “Yet for over 100 years, the antitrust laws have had the same basic objective: to protect the process of competition for the benefit of consumers, making sure there are strong incentives for businesses to operate efficiently, keep prices down, and keep quality up.”
Lina Khan explicitly rejects this limited mandate on behalf of a broader scope for antitrust legislation. She believes in going after promising technology companies in nascent markets generally, not just the ones that have achieved monopoly status, in order to smother out the ambition of plausible future monopolists in its crib. Moreover, her sights are set elsewhere than on the old-fashioned “benefit of consumers.”
In 2018 when Khan was just beginning her career as a law scholar, the New York Times explained her novel view of antitrust enforcement in an article titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Antagonist Has a Breakthrough Idea” and subtitled “With a single scholarly article, Lina Khan, 29, has reframed decades of monopoly law.”
Khan’s 2017 Yale Law Journal article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” argued that Amazon was simply too successful to go on unmolested by government obstruction, the wellbeing of the consumers be damned.
“Her argument went against a consensus in antitrust circles that dates back to the 1970s — the moment when regulation was redefined to focus on consumer welfare, which is to say price,” the Times reports. “Since Amazon is renowned for its cut-rate deals, it would seem safe from federal intervention. Ms. Khan disagreed. Over 93 heavily footnoted pages, she presented the case that the company should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy.”
Khan admitted to the Times that, “As consumers, as users, we love these tech companies.” But as her Yale Law Journal article says, “Animating these critiques is not a concern about harms to consumer welfare, but the broader set of ills and hazards that a lack of competition breeds.”
The article concludes, “To revise antitrust law and competition policy for platform markets, we should be guided by two questions. First, does our legal framework capture the realities of how dominant firms acquire and exercise power in the internet economy? And second, what forms and degrees of power should the law identify as a threat to competition? Without considering these questions, we risk permitting the growth of powers that we oppose but fail to recognize.”
As the Times summarizes, “The issue Ms. Khan’s article really brought to the fore is this: Do we trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future?”
Expanding the Scope of Antitrust
Once appointed FTC Chair, Khan took her views of antitrust applicability to a new level. Seemingly emboldened by her disregard for consumer welfare, she dispensed with an assumption that was previously foundational in antitrust thinking: Its exclusive application to monopolies that have already formed or begun the formation process. Instead, Khan aimed to prevent the monopolies of the future by preventing new technologies from being developed in the first place.
When the New York Times interviewed Khan in 2022, they asked her, “Can your work really rein in tech, which often outpaces rule-making and policy?” And in her reply, she explained that, “I think this goes back to being attentive to these next-generation technologies and next-generation innovations in nascent industries across sectors. Those can really help us tackle problems at the inception.”
The following month, Khan put her plan into action by filing an injunction to block Meta from acquiring Within, a small virtual-reality start-up key to Meta’s plans to develop the “metaverse.”
In the lawsuit, which named Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg as a defendant, the F.T.C. emphasized that, “…Meta could have chosen to try to compete with Within on the merits; instead, Meta decided it preferred to simply buy [the property].”
The significance of the move was not lost on The New York Times, which noted Khan was “upending antitrust standards” by shifting its role from dismantling monopolies to launching preemptive actions.
“Lina Khan may set off a shift in how Washington regulates competition by filing cases in tech areas before they mature,” the Times reported.
As the Wall Street Journal explained at the time, there were many reasons that Meta’s acquisition of Within would not remotely constitute the use or accretion of monopoly power. But as the Times explained, “At the heart of the F.T.C.’s lawsuit is the idea that regulators can apply antitrust law without waiting for a market to mature to the point where it is clear which companies hold the most power.”
Smothering Technological Progress in Its Crib
As FTC Chair, Khan was aiming to achieve the exact opposite of what ftc.gov claims is the purpose of ensuring market competition through antitrust enforcement: “…lower prices, higher quality products and services, more choices, and greater innovation.”
Her approach, if successful, would not only increase prices for existing technologies, but the prevention of mergers and acquisitions of tech companies would disincentivize the creation of new tech startups and thus likely reduce the amount of innovation and the choices of products on the market as well.
As the abovementioned Wall Street Journal article notes, it’s no secret that venture capitalists “often fund startups on the hope that they will be bought by larger companies.” And just like venture capitalists, profit-seeking investors and entrepreneurs of all sorts are more likely to build tech startups in an environment of frequent acquisition offers than they would be if that potential revenue stream is outlawed by the state.
The big companies will also be disincentivized from investing in developing new technologies, because they’ll know that antitrust crackdown will render such ambitions less profitable and more risky. And even when tech companies choose to pursue new technological projects despite this bad incentive structure, progress will be much slower because they’ll be forcefully prevented from capitalizing on the best new innovations of smaller companies, even though the smaller companies would benefit from their involvement or else turn down their offers.
This is a recipe for dramatically slowing humanity’s ability to make technological and scientific progress.
Corporate Power Is Consumer Power
Technological progress is one of the key ways that human beings improve the quality of life for themselves and each other. Technology has significantly increased the average human life expectancy by diminishing the prevalence of disease, starvation, and even violence in human society. It has drastically reduced the portion of humanity engaging in dangerous and unpleasant labor for a living. And it represents the best chance of defending against climate change and other risks of the future without impoverishing developing nations to the point of mass starvation.
The specific companies, industries, and technologies in the sights of Lina Khan and JD Vance are not exceptions. I’ve made essentially this case in articles about the genesis of the metaverse, the future of the metaverse, the employment effects of AI, the existential implications of AI, the history of Microsoft and Amazon, and the property claims associated with those companies, which you can read if you’d like to know more.
So beyond Khan’s explicit abandonment of consumer welfare lies an implicit crusade against it. The premise that private businesses should be prevented from becoming economically powerful misses the point that how they do so is by successfully building and distributing products that large numbers of consumers want to use. By preventing business deals and investments that would have happened if left up to the free market, Khan and Vance prevent consumers from accessing products that would have either benefited them on their own terms or failed in the market.
In his classic 1949 book Human Action, the economist Ludwig Von Mises explains the consumer’s role in which new technologies become successful on the free market:
What counts alone is the degree of superiority secured by the new invention as against old methods. Superiority means reduction in the cost of production per unit or such an improvement in the quality of the product that buyers are ready to pay adequately higher prices. The absence of a sufficient degree of superiority to make the cost of transformation profitable is proof of the fact that consumers are more intent upon acquiring other goods than upon enjoying the benefits of the new invention. It is the consumers with whom the ultimate decision rests.
Preventing corporations from wielding economic power in the free market means destroying consumer power as well. The only kind of power Khan and Vance are looking to advance is the power of coercive regulatory institutions, to the detriment of corporations and consumers alike.
If you don’t “trust Amazon, or any large company, to create our future,” as the Times summarizes the crux of Khan’s work, you don’t have to purchase their products. If that small level of influence isn’t enough for you, you can only have further influence by coercively taking away the basic freedoms of others to consume the products they want and do business with who they wish.
Meta won the lawsuit over their acquisition of Within in 2023, and throughout Khan’s tenure as FTC Chair she lodged countless such attacks on tech companies small and large, and in most cases her radical new antitrust vision was struck down by the courts. For now, the limited mandate of antitrust law has yet to be corrupted to the degree that Khan would have liked. But what if Vance or some other Khan enthusiast were elected president in 2028 or beyond? He could appoint judges more favorable to Khan’s vision, or he could launch an effort to ignore and subvert judicial oversight, as he has expressed explicit interest in doing.
The future of American industrial freedom, the world’s most powerful engine of technological progress and human prosperity, likely hinges in some significant measure on such people being kept out of political power.
An older version of this article was published by the Foundation for Economic Education.