Amid the ongoing probes of tech giants, DOJ's antitrust chief warns that amassing vast quantities of consumers' data could create competition concerns
Tony Romm / Washington Post : Tweets: @tonyromm , @alexqgb , and @markseibel Tweets: Tony Romm / @tonyromm : NEW: DOJ's top antitrust enforcer, Makan Delrahim, will lay out his case for why data and privacy could be an antitrust issue, making latest shot across bow at big tech. Better yet, he'll do it at a conference hosted by tech giants in Boston. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Alex Bowles / @alexqgb : Divest or Die I guess https://twitter.com/... Mark Seibel / @markseibel : DOJ ties privacy to potential antitrust concerns. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Makan Delrahim has been building this argument all year: in June he laid out the potential antitrust arguments the government might use against big tech, and in July the DOJ opened a formal review of search, social media, and retail platforms. This speech adds a new pillar to that case — treating the sheer volume of consumer data a platform accumulates as itself a competition problem, not just conduct around it.
The venue matters as much as the doctrine: Delrahim is delivering the warning at a Boston conference hosted by the very companies under scrutiny, signaling the DOJ intends to argue this directly to industry rather than through leaked filings. It also prefigures how the theory ages — five years later his successor Jonathan Kanter was still examining monopoly choke points across AI, cloud, and data, suggesting data-as-gatekeeper survived the change in leadership.
First-order effects
- Google, Facebook, Amazon, and the other platforms inside the DOJ's open review now face a second front: their data stockpiles themselves can be cast as evidence of market power, independent of any specific exclusionary act.
- Privacy decisions stop being purely policy calls — a platform's handling of user data becomes discoverable material for competition analysis, raising the legal stakes of every data-collection choice.
Second-order effects
- Product changes made for privacy reasons get pulled into the antitrust fight: when Google later proposed blocking online ad trackers, publishers argued it would tilt the playing field toward Google's own properties, effectively feeding the DOJ probe rather than defusing scrutiny.
- Rivals and publishers gain a new complaint channel — arguments about unfair access to consumer data give smaller players a doctrinal hook to press regulators against incumbents.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, US antitrust enforcement permanently absorbs data concentration as a competition metric, decoupling the theory from any single administration — as shown by Kanter carrying the choke-points framing into AI, cloud, GPUs, and data half a decade later.
- Platforms facing this lens may respond structurally rather than behaviorally — divestitures or data-access remedies become the plausible endgame, since hoarded data cannot be 'un-conducted' away.
The trend: US antitrust enforcers are converging on consumer-data accumulation as a competition concern in its own right, a doctrine that has persisted from Delrahim's review through Kanter's AI-era choke-point examinations.