Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department’s antitrust division in November 2021, the company secured an extra $50 million to analyze monopolies, bust legal cartels and block mergers.
To have a good time, Mr. Kanter purchased a prop of an enormous examine, positioned it exterior his workplace and wrote on the examine’s memo line: “Break ’Em Up.”
Mr. Kanter, 50, has pushed that philosophy ever since, changing into a lead architect of probably the most important effort in a long time to combat the focus of energy in company America. On Thursday, he took his greatest swing when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit in opposition to Apple. In the 88-page lawsuit, the federal government argued that Apple had violated antitrust legal guidelines with practices supposed to maintain prospects reliant on its iPhones and fewer more likely to change to competing gadgets.
That lawsuit joins two Justice Department antitrust instances in opposition to Google that argue the corporate illegally shored up monopolies. Mr. Kanter’s workers has additionally challenged quite a few company mergers, together with suing to cease JetBlue Airways from shopping for Spirit Airlines.
“We want to help real people by making sure that our antitrust laws work for workers, work for consumers, work for entrepreneurs and work to protect our democratic values,” Mr. Kanter mentioned in a January interview. He declined to touch upon the Google instances and different energetic litigation.
At a information convention concerning the Apple lawsuit on Thursday, Mr. Kanter in contrast the motion to previous Justice Department challenges to Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft. The go well with is geared toward defending “the market for the innovations that we can’t yet perceive,” he mentioned.
Mr. Kanter and Lina Khan, the chair of the Federal Trade Commission, have now taken motion in opposition to 4 of the six greatest public tech firms, in a sweeping drive to rein within the energy of the business. The F.T.C. has individually filed antitrust fits in opposition to Meta, the proprietor of Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon.
But Mr. Kanter and Ms. Khan are on the clock to see how far they will take their efforts. The November election may take away President Biden from the White House and take Mr. Kanter and Ms. Khan with him.
More than two dozen individuals who know Mr. Kanter, together with present and former Justice Department staff, described his two-decade rise. Some spoke anonymously to explain confidential authorities deliberations and displays.
Mr. Kanter was raised within the Queens, N.Y., condominium the place his mother and father nonetheless reside. After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he attended the State University of New York at Albany after which regulation faculty at Washington University in St. Louis.
“I grew up in a neighborhood with schoolteachers and police officers and taxicab drivers and shopkeepers and people who worked really hard,” he mentioned, and did so with a “belief that the American dream really provided openings and opportunities to realize a better life for future generations.”
He mentioned he linked antitrust enforcement to these values as a result of “it’s about making sure that those opportunities are available to all and making sure that people can succeed on their own merits.”
After getting his regulation diploma, Mr. Kanter labored on the F.T.C. earlier than becoming a member of massive regulation companies like Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and Paul Weiss. At one level, he represented Microsoft. When the corporate mounted an offensive in opposition to Google, which had eaten its lunch in on-line search, Mr. Kanter made the pitch round Washington that Google deserved extra scrutiny.
He later made related arguments for different Google critics, like News Corp and Yelp, and mentioned regulators ought to examine extra tech giants, too. Simultaneously, he defended company mergers in separate industries.
Mr. Kanter’s work in opposition to among the tech behemoths received him followers amongst those that believed that antitrust legal guidelines have been an important software to make the economic system extra truthful.
“Here was an insider who had also come to very similar conclusions,” Ms. Khan mentioned in an interview in November.
After his nomination by Mr. Biden was confirmed, Mr. Kanter, who usually favors formal peak lapels and as soon as wore to a photograph shoot an A. Lange & Söhne costume watch that retails for $34,500, debuted his plan for the antitrust division to its workers, folks with data of the presentation mentioned.
Mr. Kanter branded his initiatives with catchy code names. A plan for the company to rapidly weigh in on energetic authorized instances bought the Gen Z moniker “Real Time AF,” quick for real-time antitrust filings. He known as a plan to analyze senior company executives the “Billionaire Accountability Project.”
Mr. Kanter advised his group that, at any given second, he wished the division to have the ability to handle 30 civil lawsuits and one other 30 legal instances. He known as the plan “30 for 30.”
The company was already stretched skinny, and a few on the workers felt Mr. Kanter was setting unreasonable targets, folks with data of the matter mentioned.
His time in non-public apply additionally solid a shadow. Mr. Kanter initially didn’t work on lawsuits in opposition to Google as a result of he had spent years representing its rivals. When he can’t work on instances, together with the problem to JetBlue’s buy of Spirit, they’re led by his principal deputy, Doha Mekki.
Still, Mr. Kanter has been proactive on the fits in opposition to the tech giants.
As a Google antitrust case over on-line search headed to trial final 12 months, he advised authorities attorneys to be extra express and outstanding with their argument that sheer scale of the corporate’s operation entrenched its energy and made it more durable for its rivals to compete, two folks with data of the matter mentioned. That concept was a central theme when the case was tried in a Washington courtroom final fall. (A ruling is predicted later this 12 months.)
Mr. Kanter additionally oversaw the ultimate months of the Justice Department’s investigation into Google’s management of internet advertising know-how. He argued to colleagues that the federal government ought to push for the lawsuit to be determined by a jury as a substitute of a decide, which has been the norm in related civil instances, an individual conversant in the matter mentioned. A jury trial is scheduled to start out in September.
Mr. Kanter’s work has been scrutinized by critics who surprise if he and his compatriots are pushing the boundaries of antitrust regulation too far, hurting the economic system.
William Kovacic, a regulation professor at George Washington University and former chair of the F.T.C., mentioned Mr. Kanter had but to safe a victory within the sort of sweeping monopoly lawsuit that the company was pursuing in opposition to Apple and Google.
“In some ways, he’s still looking for that more prominent trophy to go on the mantelpiece,” he mentioned. “You win one of these monopolization cases, you can take the rest of the decade off.”
In the January interview, Mr. Kanter defended his push to shift how the company did enterprise. He mentioned the world had modified radically within the final 30 years. People talk utilizing new mediums, get their info from totally different sources and conduct commerce on ascendant platforms.
“It’s important that if we’re going to have antitrust enforcement that is fit-for-purpose in a modern economy we recognize those changes,” he mentioned. “And then we adapt to make sure that we are enforcing the letter of the antitrust law and the applicable precedents. But we’re enforcing the law in a way that reflects the realities of today’s economy.”
Tripp Mickle contributed reporting from San Francisco. Jack Begg contributed analysis.
