FTC challenges 'junk' patents held by 10 drugmakers, incl Novo Nordisk's Ozempic

I’m so impressed with the FTC lately, here is an excellent interview Jon Stewart did with the FTC chair Lina Khan: https://youtu.be/oaDTiWaYfcM

I did joke I’m really surprised the vested interests selected someone competent who wants to hold these companies accountable to the public.

There's a lot of talk about "both sides being the same", but the FTC alone has been a night & day difference from previous administrations.

You can tell she's doing a good job by the number of hit pieces in the WSJ. Just search "Lina Khan WSJ" and have fun scrolling through the headlines.

To be fair, her first two years were bunk. She had management and morale issues, a series of court losses (including one glaringly incompetent one with Facebook) and then a retrenchment that looked like submission.

It wasn’t. She was re-working her game. It looks like it worked and I’ve gone from critic to fan. But the FTC was mockably awful 2020 - 2022, and a non-entity early 2023.

There will always be carry over from one administration to the next at the bureaucratic level within the various agencies. It takes time to figure out how to get them aligned to make progress with the new administration's agenda.

> takes time to figure out how to get them aligned

From what I understand, Khan was learning to manage a large team. She failed at it. Noticed. Corrected. And seems to have figured it out.

The early FTC was highly centralised. In its new iteration, staffers appear to be trusted to pursue probes on their own. This not only broadens their firepower, but brings to the table staffers’ decades of experience around what wins in court.

You might say she's running the FTC like a startup: hire exceptional people you trust to execute with autonomy.

> she's running the FTC like a startup: hire exceptional people you trust to execute with autonomy

The exceptional people were there from the start. In the early days, their complaint was around being locked out of decision making. Khan and a small group ran the FTC like academics.

That failed both internally and in the courts. To her credit, she noticed the failure, regrouped and re-oriented. But the change wasn’t in star hiring but recognising the talent that was being ignored.