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
New York Times : Tweets: @stevelohr Tweets: Steve Lohr / @stevelohr : The Education of Jonathan Kanter. From corporate defense lawyer to progressive and foe of Big Tech. The Biden administration's choice to head the Justice Department's antitrust division. https://www.nytimes.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Biden's July nomination of Jonathan Kanter put a career competition lawyer with a long anti-Google record at the head of the Justice Department's antitrust division — and this New York Times profile by Steve Lohr traces the unusual path: a star corporate defense lawyer who represented Microsoft and others while working on cases against Google, now recast as a progressive foe of Big Tech.
The profile lands mid-arc: the Senate would confirm Kanter within weeks, Google would immediately question whether he can be impartial given his work for Yelp and the News Media Alliance, and by 2024 he would be cast in a follow-up profile as taking the biggest swing of his career against corporate concentration.
First-order effects
- Kanter takes over the DOJ's antitrust division with a documented record of anti-Google casework, putting Google — and Big Tech merger reviews generally — under a chief whose priors are already on the record.
- Google's impartiality challenge, citing his paid work for Yelp and the News Media Alliance, turns his client history into an immediate ethics and recusal battleground before enforcement even begins.
Second-order effects
- Microsoft occupies an awkward position: a former Kanter client whose rival cases he worked on, now facing a DOJ antitrust chief who knows its playbook from the inside.
- Companies weighing mergers with Big Tech players face a division led by someone whose first interview in office signaled a clampdown posture, raising the expected cost of deals that would have cleared under earlier leadership.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds — critic nominated, confirmed despite the target's objections, then empowered — the door opens to a structural shift in which DOJ antitrust leadership is drawn from the plaintiffs' and critics' side of the bar rather than corporate defense, hardening enforcement against concentrated corporate power as a durable policy direction.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is being rebuilt around officials with adversarial records against Big Tech, moving the DOJ from case-by-case litigation to a structural campaign against corporate concentration.