Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan on Friday countered what critics have called her knee-jerk antipathy toward corporate mergers, saying she has tried to make up for years of federal regulators discounting the harm acquisitions impose on competition and, by extension, consumers.

"What drove us here was not some type of ideological revolution. It was a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo based on empirical realities," Khan said at Fordham University law school's annual International Antitrust Law and Policy Conference. "This change in this reorientation has happened against a backdrop of a very organic sense that something was not working, that we were not adequately preserving competition across these markets."