Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker. My guest today is a lawyer who can

already lay claim at the tender age of 31 to have significantly influenced a hugely important

area of public policy debate in the United States, namely the degree to which the giant tech

corporations have acquired a potentially dangerous amount of economic power.

Lena Khan came to the US from the UK as a schoolgirl.

She excelled as a student, toyed with becoming a journalist, but instead chose the law,

and in particular focused her attention on America's antitrust laws.

And her growing conviction that the rules to prevent

dangerous monopolistic practices were failing to rein in the ever-growing power and influence

of America's most successful tech corporations. Her first target was Amazon. She wrote a legal

paper on Amazon's antitrust paradox back in 2017, which went viral.

In short, her cases that Amazon and other tech giants, while appearing to deliver what

customers want, are also, by dint of their ruthless market dominance, doing serious damage,

to genuine competition, to jobs, equality and accountability.

She and many others in the law and politics have concluded that the time has come to tame big tech,

perhaps by breaking up the biggest empires built by Facebook, Google and the like.

Will it happen? And would it be really in the public interest? Well, Lena Khan joins me

from Dallas, Texas now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thanks for having me. Do you believe there is a new

momentum behind the push to tame the big, the giant technology companies in the Western world?

Yes, I think there absolutely is.

I think we've seen a transformation in public opinion over the last few years

and the public case for how these firms have so much power

...