Of all the appointments that Joe Biden has made since becoming President, one of the most intriguing came last week, when he named Lina Khan, a thirty-two-year-old associate professor at Columbia Law School, as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, an agency with broad authority to police America’s biggest corporations, including its tech giants. After two decades in which both Democrats and Republicans have mostly taken a light-handed approach to regulating Silicon Valley, Khan’s appointment raises the prospect of a long-overdue drive to reinvigorate the enforcement of antitrust laws and inject more competition into a vital part of the economy that is dominated by a handful of gargantuan incumbents.

Biden elevated Khan immediately after the Senate voted to confirm her as one of the five commissioners who serve on the F.T.C. Despite her relative youth, she is a leading figure in the movement to crack down on abusive monopolies, particularly those in the tech sector, and other antitrust campaigners greeted her promotion with surprise and delight. “If you had asked me six or eight months ago if we could get someone like Lina Khan onto the F.T.C., I would have said, ‘Maybe,’ ” Matt Stoller, the author of the book “Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy,” from 2019, told me. “If you had asked me if we could get someone like Lina Khan to be chair of the F.T.C., I would likely have said, ‘Are you totally crazy?’ ”

…

“To overturn the Chicago School philosophy, you need a whole-government approach,” Stoller said. It’s a big task. In appointing Khan, Biden has taken an important first step.