Biden has nominated Jonathan Kanter as assistant attorney general for antitrust, where he will head the DoJ's antitrust division.
This is generally good news, along with Lina Khan at the FTC, we have two of the most prominent antitrust activists in the nation taking up positions in the Biden administration.
I generally like the Biden administration's focus on antitrust, it appears to be the most aggressive since Ronald Reagan took office, but it appears to have a narrow focus, at least for now.
Specifically, with all the talking about big tech, and to a lesser degree agriculture, but we aren't seeing a focus on anti-competitive behavior in the insurance, finance, and pharma which is rife with anti-competitive behavior:
President Biden said he plans to nominate Jonathan Kanter, who has long opposed Big Tech companies as a lawyer, to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division. It’s the latest sign of the administration’s willingness to crack down on the power and influence of Silicon Valley titans.
Kanter is known as an adversary of giant tech corporations including Google and Apple. He has represented large companies like Microsoft, as well as smaller tech companies like Google critic Yelp. He is a partner at the Kanter Law Group, which describes itself as “an antitrust advocacy boutique.”
“Throughout his career, Kanter has also been a leading advocate and expert in the effort to promote strong and meaningful antitrust enforcement and competition policy,” the White House said in a news release.
The nomination would fill a critical vacancy amid a broader administration effort to crack down on concentration in the economy, particularly in the tech sector. Biden this month signed a sweeping executive order targeting corporate consolidation, which directly challenges the path that Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple took to dominance.
Last month, he named Lina Khan, a prominent critic of the tech giants, to lead the nation’s other top antitrust enforcer, the Federal Trade Commission. Earlier this year, he named Tim Wu, a Columbia Law professor who spoke out about large tech companies, to the National Economic Council.
One would hope that anti-trust enforcement ends up both deeper and broader than it looks right now, but that would probably require legislation from Congress to explicitly reverse the pro-monopoly case law over the past 45 years or so,
0 comments :
Post a Comment