Published on Jul 18, 2024
J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator chosen by former President Donald Trump as his running mate on Monday, has broken ranks with his party in praising aggressive antitrust enforcement and said in March that FTC Chair Lina Khan was “doing a pretty good job.”
Vance, who rose to fame with his 2016 memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” has made it a habit to cheer the work of the Biden administration’s trustbusters. He welcomed proposed changes by the DOJ and FTC to the HSR form in August 2023, writing in a letter with Representative Jim Banks (R-IN) that the agencies should prioritize disseminating information about mergers involving Chinese companies due to national security concerns.
Vance has even called for the breakup of Google (GOOG) over its “monopolistic control of information,” which he believes allows the company to unfairly direct support to Democrats in the 2024 election campaign.
As vice president, Vance could champion competition work at the FTC and beyond. He’s likely to support litigation against the country’s largest tech firms, although unlike the current administration, he’s motivated more by traditional Republican concerns about large companies’ ability to restrain and control speech online.
Vance has also been labeled a “Khanservative” Republican, joining the ranks of lawmakers including Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO), Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) and former Representative Ken Buck (R-CO)
“I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” he said at a conference hosted by Bloomberg Beta and the startup accelerator Y Combinator in February.
“The fundamental question to me is how do we build a competitive marketplace that is pro-innovation, pro-competition, that allows consumers to have the right choices, and isn’t just so obsessed on pricing power within the market that it ignores all the other things that really matter,” he added…
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