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jonathan kanter
'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
New Funding Bill Shows House Republicans 'Want Monopolists to Win'
"House Democrats must take a firm stand against this problematic proposal and offer an amendment in markup to give the Antitrust Division the resources necessary to enforce the law," said one campaigner.
Jun 25, 2024
Anti-monopoly campaigners on Tuesday blasted House Republicans over a bill that would dramatically reduce funding for the U.S. Department of Justice's Antitrust Division and impose caps on how much the crucial agency gets from merger filing fees.
The House Appropriations Committee
proposal contains sweeping spending cuts, including a $40 million reduction in the DOJ Antitrust Division's budget. The $192.7 million allocated for the division is $95 million less than requested by U.S. President Joe Biden.
"House Republicans are not fully funding the Antitrust Division—this is a pro-Ticketmaster, pro-Google, pro-Apple, and pro-UnitedHealth agenda," Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), said in a statement.
"This is a pro-Ticketmaster, pro-Google, pro-Apple, and pro-UnitedHealth agenda."
In addition to the budget cut, the bill contains one rider that would cap the amount of fees the Antitrust Division gets from the bipartisan Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act and another that would effectively ban the agency from hiring more staff.
The proposed bill "would openly and deliberately disregard the will of Congress by limiting the DOJ's access to these funds," AELP said, arguing that House Republicans "want monopolists to win."
"With cases against some of the biggest monopolies in the economy already in progress or looming, the additional funds would allow the division to hire more attorneys and staff to effectively enforce the law," the group added.
According to Harper:
Despite having even fewer attorneys than it did in the 1970s, [Assistant Attorney General] Jonathan Kanter's Antitrust Division is securing unprecedented wins to turn the tide on market concentration across the economy. Appropriators should be bolstering the Antitrust Division in this moment, not kneecapping it by limiting hiring and reducing funds Congress authorized through the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act.
"House Democrats must take a firm stand against this problematic proposal and offer an amendment in markup to give the Antitrust Division the resources necessary to enforce the law," Harper added.
The GOP proposal comes amid a flurry of antitrust action by the Biden administration, whose DOJ has investigated UnitedHealth Group, the world's largest health insurance company, and sued Apple, Google, and Ticketmaster. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan has taken on Amazon and other corporations.
"The DOJ Antitrust Division has won victories in court against employers that sought to suppress workers' pay and blocked harmful mergers in the airline industry," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said while addressing U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland during a hearing earlier this month.
"You're working to lower food prices by targeting anti-competitive practices and mergers in the grocery industry and the meat processing industry, and the Antitrust Division successfully ended a price fixing scheme in DVD and Blu-ray sales and prevented video game companies from suppressing wages in e-sports," she continued.
"These are incredible accomplishments, and you're also working to promote competition in the live music industry," Jayapal added, referring to the lawsuit
filed last month by the DOJ and 30 state attorneys general against Live Nation and its Ticketmaster subsidiary.
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