LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman was quick to express support for Kamala Harris' bid for the US presidency this year after incumbent Joe Biden stepped aside, and now the reason has become clear: He's hoping she'll fire FTC boss and Big Tech arch-critic Lina Khan.

Word of Hoffman's support came almost immediately after Biden endorsed Harris, with other Silicon Valley leaders also expressing support for the presumptive Democratic party nominee. But in a CNN interview on Thursday, Hoffman said he hoped his support - and a $7 million donation to a pro-Harris political action committee - would be enough to tip Khan out of her seat as the nation's top antitrust enforcer.

"Lina Khan is … a person who is not helping America," Hoffman told CNN, while touting Harris as more pro-business than Donald Trump due to the latter's support for tariffs.

"I would hope that Vice President Harris would replace [Khan]," Hoffman added. "Antitrust is fine…Waging war is not." 

Khan, a Biden appointee, has been embraced by many as a champion for consumer rights, an opponent of monopolies, and working against tech giants abusing their market power. Silicon Valley has been less enamored of her, and Hoffman has more reason than many to dislike the work she's done - he is a member of the Microsoft board, and Khan has gone after Redmond several times since taking her seat at the federal regulator. 

Since Khan being sworn in in 2021, the FTC has opposed Microsoft's $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard (a case it ultimately lost), and early this year it begun an investigation of Redmond's close $13 billion relationship with OpenAI and whether the pairing was harming competition. 

Most recently, the FTC raised concerns that the Microsoft-Activision merger was already harming gamers in the exact way the watchdog warned: By causing a spike in prices for Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass along with degraded offerings at lower tiers, not to mention mass layoffs of staff. 

"Product degradation, combined with price increases for existing users, is exactly the sort of consumer harm from the merger the FTC has alleged," the regulator said earlier this week.

Whether Hoffman's tit-for-tat request has been heard by the Harris campaign is unclear; we've reached out for comment. The campaign did tell CNN there hasn't been any discussion about replacing Khan as of yet, if Harris were to win. Hoffman has yet to respond to our questions on his comments.

Harris has reportedly raised more than $100 million in election campaign funding in less than a week. There's likely to be a few more pro-tech caveats with that bundle of cash. Whether Harris will comply remains to be seen, but that's a lot of cash. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/26/harris_hoffman_ftc_boss/