With the nomination of Jonathan Kanter as the head of the DOJ’s antitrust division, we have a trifecta.
From Lauren Hirsch and David McCabe’s “Biden to Name a Critic of Big Tech as the Top Antitrust Cop” in Wednesday’s New York Times:
Jonathan Kanter, a longtime antitrust lawyer, has built his career largely around working for smaller rivals of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple.
The White House said on Tuesday that it would nominate Jonathan Kanter to be the top antitrust official at the Justice Department, a move that would add another longtime critic of Big Tech and corporate concentration to a powerful regulatory position.
President Biden’s plan to appoint Mr. Kanter, an antitrust lawyer who has made a career out of representing rivals of American tech giants like Google and Facebook, signals how strongly the administration is siding with the growing field of lawmakers, researchers and regulators who say Silicon Valley has obtained outsize power over the way Americans speak with one another, buy products online and consume news.
Mr. Biden has named other critics of Big Tech to prominent roles, such as Lina Khan, a critic of Amazon, to lead the Federal Trade Commission. Tim Wu, another legal scholar who says regulators need to crack down on the tech giants, serves in an economic policy role at the White House. And this month, Mr. Biden signed a sweeping executive order aimed at increasing competition across the economy and limiting corporate dominance.
My take: Kanter, Khan and Wu. Sounds like a heavy duty law firm.
The issue is the outcry concerning monopoly control is coming, not from the general public, but from other platforms trying to establish themselves in an already saturated market. This doesn’t mean there is not room for more regulatory control (though the current administration wanting to dictate universal platform bans for people and ideas they don’t like sounds like a very bad direction) from tech but I don’t see how they “bust” up some of these.
Apple? Perhaps iTunes and AppleTV but it would be hard pressed to break away any significant chunk given they all use the same tool sets, OSes, APIs and such. Doing so would simply destroy the entire eco-system and make the products a RPITA to use.
Amazon? Alexa and those services but again, these are only small parts of their overall business.
Google? YouTube could easily be independent. Android? You could break it apart but it would quickly die a painful death with thousands of splinters working through the industry.
FaceBook? Instagram and What’sApp could become independent again.