A profile of Jonathan Kanter, the DOJ's assistant AG for antitrust, a longtime Google foe who filed the US anti-monopoly lawsuit to break up its ad business
https://www.wsj.com/... Google already very far behind the curve in making its case, if it has one, to be left alone. Ask yourself: Who speaks for Google on the lawsuit? Answer right now: No one. Very bad start for Google. 4/ Hugh Hewitt / @hughhewitt : DOJ's suit against @Google is the @ATT break-up case of our time. As a young clerk on an AT&T break-up/access fee case before the D.C. Circuit, I was swamped by amicus briefs and that was a secondary case! The @Google case will consume entire careers. Some key points. 1
Context & Ripple Effects
Jonathan Kanter's path to this profile runs through the private bar: the 2021 reporting on his nomination detailed years of anti-Google work representing Microsoft and other critics before he took over the Antitrust Division. That history triggered an ethics fight almost immediately — within months of confirmation he was barred from Google cases while the DOJ weighed whether his prior client work forced recusal.
The question resolved in the government's favor: days after Kanter filed the DOJ's ad tech breakup suit with California and seven other states in January 2023, and again eight months later, courts left him on the case — a judge declined to order his recusal despite Google's objections about his past work for its critics. This WSJ profile lands five days after the filing, framing the man behind the most structurally aggressive antitrust action against a tech company in decades.
First-order effects
- Kanter now personally leads the kind of case he built his career arguing from the outside — Google faces a formal breakup demand for its ad business with no recusal route left after the court declined to remove him.
- Google must litigate against an adversary with documented familiarity with its ad tech practices, having already lost the effort to disqualify him.
Second-order effects
- Google's former critics-turned-clients of Kanter, such as Microsoft and Yelp, see their long-running complaints converted into state power, shifting the burden onto Google to defend market structure it previously only had to defend in op-eds.
- The nine-state coalition joining the suit raises the cost of any settlement, since Google would need to satisfy multiple attorneys general rather than a single federal plaintiff.
Third-order effects
- Hugh Hewitt's comparison to the AT&T breakup points at the real stakes: if the suit follows that template, it becomes a decade-scale structural case that consumes careers on both sides and sets the precedent for how the US dismantles — or declines to dismantle — a dominant ad intermediary.
- The pattern of advocates becoming enforcers, surviving recusal challenges, and pursuing breakups rather than conduct remedies would harden into a playbook for future administrations targeting concentrated tech markets.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is being reshaped by officials whose careers were built opposing Big Tech, moving from outside advocacy to structural remedies like breakups once they hold prosecutorial power.