Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA), A Silicon Valley Congressman, Takes On Amazon

An interview with Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA).

Freshman Congressman Rep Ro Khanna (D-CA), who represents the South Bay, including a big chunk of Silicon Valley, said that the Amazon-Whole Foods deal shows why the government should think differently about mergers. “This as a case study for how we think about antitrust policy,” he said. “It’s the particulars here.” Rep Khanna said that recent antitrust cases have turned on the question of whether a merger would, in point of fact, immediately raise prices for consumers. Drawing on the work of Matt Stoller and Lina Khan at the New America Foundation, he traced that very narrow test to Robert Bork’s The Antitrust Paradox, which was a move away from decades of more expansive thinking about industry concentration. In this interview, Khanna calls for a “reorientation” of antitrust decision making to look at a much broader set of concerns, including the effect that a merger could have on jobs, wages, innovation, and small businesses. Whether he can get traction for this idea might be a bellwether for how well the populist wave in US politics can translate into policy reprioritization.