Profile of Biden's DOJ antitrust chief nominee Jonathan Kanter, a star corporate lawyer who worked on anti-Google cases while representing Microsoft and others
Context & Ripple Effects
This New York Times profile lands mid-arc: Biden had already put forward Jonathan Kanter in July as a long-time foe of Google, and the Senate would confirm him weeks after publication as DOJ's antitrust chief. The profile's core tension — a star corporate lawyer who built a practice attacking Google on behalf of Microsoft, Yelp, and the News Media Alliance now poised to regulate those very targets — is exactly what shapes the next two years of coverage.
That tension surfaces immediately: within days of taking office, Google formally challenges whether Kanter can be impartial given his private-sector work, forcing an ethics screen over the biggest competition dockets in Washington.
First-order effects
- Kanter's confirmation puts a lawyer with documented anti-Google advocacy at the top of DOJ antitrust, and Google's public impartiality challenge immediately raises the prospect of recusals or ethics walls around any Google case he touches.
- Microsoft and Kanter's other former clients gain an unusually sympathetic audience inside the agency that will judge their own mergers and conduct.
Second-order effects
- Kanter's own early-office framing of his mission — slamming the brakes on mergers — signals that tech acquirers should expect harder clearance paths, pushing dealmakers toward smaller, less reviewable transactions.
- Google's adversaries from Kanter's private-practice years are positioned to press their grievances through an enforcer who already knows their arguments firsthand, shifting litigation strategy across the industry.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, antitrust leadership drawn from the private anti-Big-Tech bar becomes a durable template, normalizing enforcers with deep financial ties to one side of the market they police — and making conflict-of-interest screening a standing feature of appointments.
- By the time of the 2024 profile framing his biggest swing against corporate power concentration, the throughline is visible: a decades-long personal campaign converted into state enforcement power, with the structure of US tech markets as the stake.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is being reshaped by installing career critics of Big Tech into its top posts, converting private-practice campaigns against Google-style dominance into formal government power.