To understand how the Justice Department’s new antitrust chief, Jonathan Kanter, is thinking about his job, take a look around his office.
On one wall hangs a painting of the prosecutor who brought the case that crushed John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil monopoly. There’s also a picture of a bison with the words “Ass Kicking Is On My Mind.” And then there are the historic posters from an earlier trustbusting era.
Kanter, an affable 48-year-old with oversized dark-rimmed glasses, is planning an aggressively activist approach to his new job. His mission: to reverse decades of lax enforcement that he said has allowed companies to dominate industries and thwart competition.
“We’re not just bringing a few big cases, we’re changing the way it’s done,” said Kanter in his first interview since taking over in November.
Sitting around a large conference table with his team, Kanter said they’re “turning the page on a failed experiment,” referring to decades of laissez-faire merger policy.
In bringing back the trustbusting tenor of the early 20th century, Kanter is carrying out a key part of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, which aims to increase competition across the economy after decades of consolidation.
But he faces an array of obstacles -- from unfriendly judges to companies like Alphabet Inc. that have the resources to wage years-long legal battles against antitrust watchdogs.
Kanter and Lina Khan, his counterpart at the Federal Trade Commission, which also enforces competition laws, are trying to halt concentration amid a merger avalanche. The agencies reviewed some 3,500 transactions in the fiscal year that ended in September, a record.
The antitrust division is now juggling five merger challenges and a monopoly lawsuit that accuses Alphabet’s Google of abusing its power in internet search. It’s also investigating Google’s digital advertising business and Apple Inc. over how it runs the App Store, Bloomberg has reported.
The Biden administration is proposing steep jumps in funding for both antitrust agencies in its proposed fiscal 2023 budget as part of its push to make markets more competitive.
One of Kanter’s priorities is to prevent tech platforms from acquiring new, disruptive technologies that threaten their dominance. For years, antitrust cops stood by while tech giants gobbled up smaller companies, a strategy that critics say allowed the platforms to cement their power and conquer new markets. Kanter said he also intends to sue to block more mergers in court rather than accept settlements that allow deals to proceed.
On Tuesday, for example, shipping giants Cargotec Oyj and Konecranes Oyj abandoned a planned merger after Kanter threatened to go to court to block the deal.
The prospect of tougher merger enforcement is sounding alarm bells. “In every deal, there is a great deal of attention being paid to potential antitrust risks,” said Andrea Basham, a partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP in New York, whose firm is advising clients to consider remedies such as divesting businesses before going into a review, rather than trying to negotiate one later. Basham said she is seeing “caution in all sectors.”