Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan led her fellow Democrats in the agency’s majority vote to sue Meta Platforms Inc. this week, despite the staff recommending against bringing a case to challenge the company’s acquisition of Within Unlimited Inc., according to three people with knowledge of the decision.
The move demonstrates Khan’s new, more aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement compared with her predecessors — as well as the challenges she faces in bringing the agency along with her.
Agency leadership has been reluctant in the past to counter a recommendation from staff lawyers and economists, whose job it is to provide a technical assessment of whether proposed deals are anticompetitive and whether the agency has the elements to build a winning case.
