Profile of DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim who has been privately telling people to expect a criminal antitrust case in Silicon Valley in the next few months
As Hollywood scales up to battle big tech, Makan Delrahim, the nation's top antitrust regulator (and a former movie producer) … Tweets: @flargh and @alexweprin See also Mediagazer Tweets: Peter Cohen / @flargh : Here's a look at one of the most important people in government you know nothing about, but could have a profound effect on how you consume (or produce) content. (via @Techmeme) https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/ ... Alex Weprin / @alexweprin : TIL about Makan Delrahim from Eriq's great profile today: He was the EP of a horror-comedy film starring Adrian Grenier called “Trash Fire,” and a board member for the World Poker Tour. https://twitter.com/... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
Makan Delrahim arrived at the DOJ antitrust division as a former AT&T lobbyist whose own past comments downplayed the AT&T–Time Warner deal, then went on to lead the government's lawsuit against that very merger — a record that made his enforcement instincts hard to read. The intervening coverage filled in the doctrine: by mid-2019 he was publicly laying out the antitrust arguments the US government may use against big tech, and by November he was warning that amassing vast quantities of consumer data could itself create competition concerns.
This profile adds two things the prior coverage lacked: a timeline — private signals pointing to a criminal case in Silicon Valley within months — and a motive layer, since Delrahim is a former movie producer writing about Hollywood as it scales up its own battle with big tech over how content is produced and distributed. A criminal case would mark an escalation from the civil litigation track his public remarks have described so far.
First-order effects
- Silicon Valley's largest platforms move from defending against civil antitrust theory to preparing for criminal prosecution, where penalties and discovery reach conduct allegations civil suits don't.
- Hollywood gains a sympathetic figure at the top of the antitrust division — a one-time producer now regulating the distributors squeezing studios' economics.
Second-order effects
- Tech companies' Washington operations shift resources toward conduct-focused defense and lobbying, since a criminal-track DOJ changes the calculus that civil settlements and merger concessions can contain regulatory risk.
- Data-aggregation strategies face fresh scrutiny: if hoarding consumer data becomes a stated competition concern, acquisitions and product designs built on data scale inherit legal exposure.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, criminal prosecution becomes a standard DOJ tool against major tech firms rather than a last resort, permanently raising the cost of anticompetitive conduct relative to civil remedies.
- Content-industry grievances and antitrust enforcement converge structurally, giving media companies a durable channel — through a regulator who knows their business — to shape platform economics.
The trend: Under Delrahim, DOJ antitrust enforcement is escalating from civil litigation and merger fights toward criminal cases against Silicon Valley, with consumer-data concentration as the doctrinal trigger.