The Trustbuster that has Apple and Google in its sights

Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured another $50 million to investigate monopolies, break up criminal cartels and block mergers.

To celebrate, Mr. Kanter bought a prop of a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the memo line of the check: “Break ‘Em Up.”

Mr. Kanter, 50, has promoted that philosophy ever since, becoming a leading architect of the most significant effort in decades to combat the concentration of power in corporate America. He made his biggest blow Thursday when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. In the 88-page lawsuit, the government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws with practices designed to keep customers dependent on their iPhones and less likely to switch to competing devices.

This lawsuit joins two antitrust lawsuits brought by the Department of Justice against Google, alleging that the company illegally strengthened monopolies. Mr. Kanter’s staff has also challenged numerous corporate mergers, including a lawsuit to stop JetBlue Airways from acquiring Spirit Airlines.

“We want to help real people by making sure our antitrust laws work for workers, work for consumers, work for entrepreneurs and work to protect our democratic values,” Kanter said in an interview in January. He declined to comment on the Google cases and other active lawsuits.

At one news conference on the Apple lawsuit on Thursday, Mr. Kanter compared the action to previous Justice Department challenges to Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft. The lawsuit is aimed at protecting “the market for the innovations that we cannot yet observe,” he said.

Mr. Kanter and Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, have now taken action against four of the six largest public technology companies in a sweeping effort to rein in the industry’s power. The FTC has separately filed antitrust cases against Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon.

But Mr. Kanter and Ms. Khan are busy seeing how far they can go with their efforts. The November election could remove President Biden from the White House and take Mr. Kanter and Ms. Khan with him.

More than two dozen people who know Kanter, including current and former Justice Department employees, described his rise over the past two decades. Some spoke anonymously to describe confidential government deliberations and presentations.

Mr. Kanter grew up in the apartment in Queens, New York, where his parents still live. After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he attended the State University of New York at Albany and then law school at Washington University in St. Louis.

“I grew up in a neighborhood with teachers and police officers and taxi drivers and shopkeepers and people who worked very hard,” he said, and did so with the “belief that the American dream really provided openings and opportunities to create a better life for people.” to realise’. future generations.”

He said he tied antitrust enforcement to these values ​​because “it’s about making sure these opportunities are available to everyone and making sure people can succeed on their own.”

After obtaining his law degree, Mr. Kanter worked at the FTC before joining major law firms such as Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and Paul Weiss. At one point he represented Microsoft. As the company launched an offensive against Google, which had eaten its lunch in online search, Mr. Kanter made clear in Washington that Google deserved additional scrutiny.

He later made similar arguments to other Google critics such as News Corp and Yelp, saying regulators should also investigate other tech giants. At the same time, he defended corporate mergers in individual sectors.

Kanter’s work against a number of tech giants won him fans among those who believed antitrust laws were an essential tool for making the economy fairer.

“Here was an insider who had also come to very similar conclusions,” Ms. Khan said in an interview in November.

After his nomination was confirmed by Mr. Biden, Mr. Kanter, who often favors formal peak lapels and once a photo shoot an A. Lange & Söhne dress watch that retails for $34,500, presented his plan for the antitrust division to staff, people with knowledge of the presentation said.

Mr Kanter described his initiatives with catchy code names. A plan for the agency to quickly intervene in active lawsuits earned the Gen Z nickname “Real Time AF,” short for real-time antitrust filings. He called a plan to investigate senior business leaders the “Billionaire Accountability Project.”

Mr. Kanter told his team that he wanted the department to be able to handle 30 civil lawsuits and another 30 criminal cases at any given time. He called the plan ’30 for 30′.

The agency was already stretched thin and some on staff felt Mr. Kanter was setting unreasonable goals, people with knowledge of the matter said.

His time in private practice also cast a shadow. Mr. Kanter did not initially work on lawsuits against Google because he had spent years representing his rivals. When he can’t work on cases, including the challenge to JetBlue’s purchase of Spirit, they are led by his chief deputy, Doha Mekki.

Still, Mr. Kanter has been proactive in the lawsuits against the tech giants.

When a Google antitrust lawsuit over online search went to trial last year, he told government lawyers to be more explicit and prominent in their argument that the sheer size of the company’s operations entrenched the company’s power and left it ahead of its rivals made it harder to compete. knowledgeable said. That idea was a central theme when the case went to trial in a Washington courtroom last fall. (A ruling is expected later this year.)

Mr. Kanter also oversaw the final months of the Justice Department’s investigation into Google’s control of online advertising technology. He argued to colleagues that the government should insist that the lawsuit be decided by a jury rather than a judge, which is the norm in similar civil cases, a person familiar with the matter said. A jury trial will take place in September.

Mr. Kanter’s work has come under scrutiny from critics who question whether he and his compatriots are pushing the limits of antitrust law too far, hurting the economy.

William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and former chairman of the FTC, said Kanter had not yet won the kind of sweeping monopoly lawsuit the organization pursued against Apple and Google.

“In some ways he’s still looking for that more prominent trophy for the mantelpiece,” he said. “If you win one of these monopolization cases, you can take the rest of the decade off.”

In the January interview, Mr. Kanter defended his commitment to changing the way the agency does business. He said the world has changed radically in the past thirty years. People communicate through new media, get their information from different sources and do business on emerging platforms.

“It is important that if we want antitrust enforcement that is fit for purpose in a modern economy, we recognize these changes,” he said. “And then we adapt to ensure that we uphold the letter of the antitrust law and the applicable precedents. But we enforce the law in a way that reflects the realities of today’s economy.”

Tripp Mickle contributed reporting from San Francisco. Jack Beg research contributed.