Interview with DOJ antitrust chief Jonathan Kanter, his first since taking office, on the agency's goals, clamping down on mergers, and more
Bloomberg : Tweets: @stuloren , @paulaedwyer , @tina_davis , and @benbrodydc Tweets: Stuart Loren / @stuloren : 1/ Antitrust wasn't my best grade in law school, but I learned enough to know that you can't just clamp down on mergers without a basis in actual law or prior judicial rulings. Just because a business is large doesn't mean it's de facto engaging in anticompetitive behavior. https://twitter.com/... Paula Dwyer / @paulaedwyer : That screeching sound you just heard? It's the Justice Department's new antitrust chief slamming the brakes on the merger wave https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @bpolitics Tina Davis / @tina_davis : DOJ antitrust chief says he's “turning the page on a failed experiment” of decades of laissez-faire merger policy https://www.bloomberg.com/... Ben Brody / @benbrodydc : “There's also a picture of a bison with the words ‘Ass Kicking Is On My Mind.’” @saraforden and @damclaugh nab Kanter's first sitdown since landing at @JusticeATR https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Jonathan Kanter's first interview as DOJ antitrust chief closes the loop that opened with Biden's July 2021 nomination of a self-described long-time foe of Google, followed by profiles casting him as a star corporate lawyer who litigated anti-Google cases for Microsoft and others before joining government.
The interview's significance is directional: after years in which large deals cleared routinely, the division's new leadership is publicly committing to slamming the brakes on mergers — a signal aimed at dealmakers deciding whether to bring transactions at all.
First-order effects
- Companies with pending or contemplated mergers now face a DOJ whose chief says he will challenge deals more aggressively, raising the odds of second requests, extended reviews, and blocked transactions.
- Kanter himself gains the public platform to define the division's enforcement priorities directly, rather than through case filings alone.
Second-order effects
- Boards and their advisers begin pricing higher regulatory risk into deal valuations and timelines, which chills overall merger volume and shifts bargaining leverage toward targets.
- Dominant platforms — Google most visibly, given Kanter's litigation history against it — face an enforcer predisposed to test their conduct in court rather than settle for behavioral remedies.
Third-order effects
- If the posture holds, US merger policy moves structurally away from the laissez-faire standard of recent decades toward treating market concentration itself as grounds for challenge, regardless of demonstrable consumer harm.
- The same logic extends beyond mergers into monopolization cases against incumbents — the path the division later pursued in the Google search and ad tech matters Kanter discussed in his 2024 Q&A.
The trend: US antitrust enforcement is shifting from permissive, effects-based merger review to aggressive structural challenges under Kanter's DOJ, with big-tech monopolization as the flagship front.