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jonathan kanter
After Two Setbacks For Google’s Monopoly, the Fight To Rein in Its Empire Continues
Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.
May 02, 2025
Don’t look now, but the federal government just notched not one, but two, major antitrust victories against one of the biggest corporations on Earth.
In the past few decades, digital monopolists like Google have built far-reaching empires impacting almost every facet of our online lives. Long given an effective pass for its anti-competitive behavior, the company is finally getting its comeuppance in federal court, and not a moment too soon.
Back in 2020, the Department of Justice (DOJ) sued Google for illegally monopolizing the search market. In 2023, this was followed by a second suit over the company’s digital advertising monopoly. In the first case, federal Judge Amit Mehta stated the obvious in his ruling that when it comes to the search engine market, Google is a monopolist; in April, the DOJ pushed an ambitious remedy proposal to dismantle its search monopoly. Google was dealt another blow in April in the second case, where judge Leonie Brinkema agreed that Google has illegally monopolized online advertising.
Antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior.
There’s no question that Google’s monopoly is looking more fragile than ever. Even as Big Tech CEOs have bent over backwards to curry favor with the Trump administration, they’ve failed to stop antitrust efforts against them from continuing. And at a time when Meta is also in the antitrust hot seat in court, there’s real reason for optimism when it comes to finally taking Big Tech to task.
Nevertheless, when you consider the scale of Google’s empire, the search and digital advertising lawsuits should be seen as just the beginning of the battle. Sure, anyone who’s used a computer understands just how ubiquitous Google’s search engine is. But less obvious to most people is that it is set to control a media empire bigger than Disney, all while working to dominate the self-driving car market and gobble up promising startups. This doesn’t even get into the AI factor: As the DOJ noted in court, the rapid pace of AI development could further entrench Google’s monopoly if left unchecked.
Take YouTube, Google’s most powerful asset after search. As antitrust suits against Google in the U.S. and abroad have piled up in recent years, YouTube has often felt like a threat hidden in plain sight. Take the issue of advertising on YouTube, for example. The Information, a tech-focused publication, noted last year that Google has a policy of requiring would-be YouTube advertisers to use Google’s in-house DV360 tool. The impact of this rule has, predictably, been to put more money in Google’s pockets while deepening advertisers’ reliance on its services.
For $1.6 billion in 2006, Google was able to take control of what today is the world’s largest video platform, with the deal avoiding antitrust action. Almost 20 years later, there remains no real competitor to YouTube: Though TikTok and Instagram’s Reels compete with YouTube when it comes to short-form video, the service is without a peer in long-form, monetizable content.
In June 2024, a coalition of advocacy groups called on the DOJ to scrutinize YouTube. In their letter, they noted that the platform’s dominance is propped up by bundling practices that make it nearly impossible for rivals to compete. Of specific concern is that smart TVs emerging as a norm in U.S. households could allow Google and YouTube to cement its dominance in home entertainment.
Few moves better illustrate Google’s expansionist mindset (and arrogance in the face of antitrust lawsuits) than its bid to acquire Wiz. Though not a household name, there’s a reason that Google is intent on acquiring it, even after its initial bid was turned down. Despite launching just five years ago, Wiz has grown so fast that it is now used by roughly half of all Fortune 500 companies. By acquiring Wiz, Google will make other corporate giants even more dependent on its services, further fortifying its monopoly status.
Much of the coverage of the Wiz deal centers on its price tag, and for good reason. At $32 billion dollars, the Wiz acquisition stands to be the most expensive in Google’s history. This isn’t just notable because it is occurring in the face of multiple antitrust showdowns. But more unusual is that this figure is 30 times larger than Wiz’s expected revenue for 2025. While the math may seem peculiar at first, there’s likely more than meets the eye here.
Few have better insight into Google’s anti-competitive behavior than Jonathan Kanter, who took the company to court twice when he led the DOJ Antitrust Division under former President Joe Biden. In a recent CNBC interview, Kanter posited that the deal could be a “Trojan horse for Google to get access to data that is increasingly becoming out of its reach.”
In 2006, federal regulators fumbled the ball by allowing the acquisition of YouTube to go through unscathed. The next year, the Federal Trade Commission made the mistake of allowing Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick, a deal that would help build and cement the company’s digital advertising dominance. But two decades later, antitrust enforcers are now making major strides toward reining in Google’s anti-competitive behavior. As federal officials work to correct the mistakes of the past, they should continue taking a multifaceted approach to Google’s monopoly.
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'Plutocracy Is Its Own Kind of Dictatorship,' Biden Antitrust Chief Warns in Farewell Address
"When companies larger, wealthier, and more powerful than most world governments threaten individual liberty with coercive private taxation and regulation, it threatens our way of life," said U.S. Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter.
Dec 18, 2024
Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, the antitrust head at the Department of Justice who helped turbocharge the agency's efforts to rein in monopoly power, bid farewell to his post in a speech Tuesday during which he warned that "plutocracy is its own kind of dictatorship."
Kanter's deputy, Doha Mekki, will take over leading the Antitrust Division starting Friday. President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Gail Slater, a tech and media policy advisor who worked for Vice President-elect JD Vance, to permanently replace Kanter.
In his speech, Kanter described how President Joe Biden's administration had a clear mandate from the public to break with the antitrust approach of previous decades: "When I took office in 2021, questions about monopoly power were no longer just a technocratic concern relegated to the narrow halls of white-shoe law firms and elite academic institutions. Our nation was experiencing a remarkable moment unlike any I had seen in my lifetime. Americans across the country had become acutely aware of the powerful forces that were suppressing their economic freedom."
To get himself ready for the role, he looked for inspiration from the "storied trustbusters of yesteryear"—particularly Assistant Attorney General Robert Jackson, who led antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice under FDR. "In 2021, the similarities to 1936 were unmistakable. They say that history rhymes. Well, it sure does. And this time it had 'bars,' as the youth say."
Then, as now, antitrust enforcement is an engine for economic prosperity, Kanter said. It can lower prices by limiting the market power of large companies, increase growth and prosperity by curbing corporate-imposed private regulation that "sap entrepreneurs of opportunity," and provide greater mobility and higher wages for workers, he argued.
With that "why" in mind, the division "confronted the Herculean task of operationalizing our mandate to restore, revive, and reimagine antitrust enforcement for our nation."
In many respects, Kanter was successful in that mission. During his time with the Department of Justice, the agency notched a major legal victory over the company Google, which Kanter's team and states had argued held an illegal monopoly in the search engine and advertising market. In August, a federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopolist for spending tens of billions on default search deals, a decision that has been called the "biggest antitrust case of the 21st century."
The Antitrust Division has also filed ongoing cases against Visa, the rent-fixing software RealPage, Ticketmaster, and others. Cases brought by the division also successfully blocked a merger between publishing giants Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster, as well as JetBlue's acquisition of Spirit.
In response to the news that Kanter is stepping down, Nidhi Hegde, interim executive director at the American Economic Liberties Project, said Tuesday that under Kanter's leadership "the DOJ Antitrust Division has become an enforcer fit for the modern economy—and a powerful ally of American consumers, workers, and small businesses."
Kanter offered advice to future enforcers, such as engaging people outside of the Beltway and "dispel[ling] the myth that less competition at home helps the U.S. compete more abroad."
The stakes of lax enforcement are high, he warned: "When companies larger, wealthier, and more powerful than most world governments threaten individual liberty with coercive private taxation and regulation, it threatens our way of life."
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Kamala Harris Should Embrace—and Build Upon—Biden’s Antitrust Legacy
Harris should reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission, signalling that under her administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.
Sep 06, 2024
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris’ ascension to the top of the Democratic ticket hasn’t just shifted the 2024 electoral calculus—it’s also reignited the battle for the party’s ideological soul. Just as progressives have outlined their hopes for a Harris administration, so too have bad faith actors looking to turn back the clock on the most significant progressive achievement of the Biden era: the reinvigoration of antitrust enforcement.
The revival of anti-monopoly politics has been met with predictable ire from corporate interests that have got off scot-free for decades. This has been largely directed at Lina Khan, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) chair who has taken on some of America’s most entrenched monopolies. Rather than accede to the demands of Silicon Valley and Wall Street billionaires, Harris should embrace—and entrench—the Biden administration’s antitrust efforts.
It goes without saying that progressives have the right to be disappointed with the legacy of the Biden administration in many respects. Whether one lays the blame on the White House or congressional math, many of the most promising initiatives pushed in 2021 never made it to law. However, the early Biden administration’s focus on reinvigorating antitrust enforcement is one that has paid dividends in the years that followed. The Reagan-era defanging of antitrust helped pave the way for the present-day monopoly crisis, which has left its mark on everything from the tech sector to the rental market to grocery shopping.
The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.
The Biden administration deserves credit for breaking with his predecessors’ hands-off approach to taking on corporate monopolies. Both Khan at the FTC and Jonathan Kanter, the assistant attorney general for the Antitrust Division at the Department of Justice (DOJ), have taken a tough line against anti-competitive behavior. Khan and Kanter’s efforts to block illegal mergers have been met with rage from corporate America’s worst offenders. This has resulted in frivolous demands for their recusals from key antitrust cases, as well as broader efforts to kneecap antitrust regulation itself. With a “changing of the guard” on the Democratic ticket, these same actors have taken to demanding Harris abandon Biden-era antitrust efforts, complete with a change in personnel.
Harris should reject these demands, and instead look to Khan and Kanter’s successes as a road map for enacting change in Washington. Time and time again, Khan and Kanter have delivered victories for consumers in the face of a hostile press and a right-wing judicial landscape. In August, the DOJ emerged victorious in its historic U.S. v. Google antitrust lawsuit, one that Kanter fittingly says belongs on the “Mount Rushmore of antitrust cases.” In the years following House Democrats’ 2020 report on monopoly power in the tech sector, Biden administration enforcers have filed antitrust suits against Amazon and Apple, along with a separate Google suit set to go to trial this month.
If successful, these lawsuits stand to rein in some of the tech sector’s worst abuses. But make no mistake: The FTC and DOJ’s antitrust efforts target far more than just the abuses of the “Big Tech” giants. This year, the DOJ launched a blockbuster antitrust suit against Ticketmaster, which was largely given a pass for its abuses in previous administrations. The DOJ Antitrust Division has stood with tenants by filing an antitrust lawsuit against RealPage over the company’s role in enabling rental price gouging. The FTC under Khan has taken aim at price gouging in, among others, the energy industry and grocery sector, which compliments Harris’ stated plan to crack down on price gouging if elected.
Antitrust enforcement is both crucial to building a fairer economy and broadly popular with the general public. For this reason, Harris should firmly reject the smear campaign against Khan’s FTC and commit to reappointing her as chair of the commission. Doing so would send a strong signal that under a Harris administration, corporate lawbreakers would face the full force of the law.
Instead of turning back the clock on antitrust, a Harris administration should build upon the progress of the last three years by launching other needed antitrust initiatives. This could include, among others, taking on YouTube-related competition issues, which advocates have sounded the alarm on. More broadly, the DOJ and FTC under a Harris administration should continue to probe would-be monopolists in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. Given the scope of monopolistic behavior in today’s economy, regulators under a Harris Administration must take a vigilant approach to anti-competitive practices across sectors.Keep ReadingShow Less
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