Antitrust choices signal tough stance on corporate titans

WASHINGTON — President Biden has assembled the most aggressive antitrust team in decades, stacking his administration with three legal crusaders as it prepares to take on corporate consolidation and market power with efforts that could include blocking mergers and breaking up big companies.

Biden’s decision this past week to name Jonathan Kanter to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division is the latest sign of his willingness to clash with corporate America to promote more competition in the tech industry and across the economy. Kanter has spent years as a lawyer fighting behemoths such as Facebook and Google on behalf of rival companies.

If confirmed by the Senate, he will join Lina Khan, who helped reframe the academic debate over antitrust and now leads the Federal Trade Commission, and Tim Wu, a longtime proponent of breaking up Facebook and other large companies who is now the special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy.

The appointments show both the Democratic Party’s renewed antitrust activism and the Biden administration’s growing concern that the concentration of power in technology, as well as other industries such as pharmaceuticals, agriculture, health care and finance, has hurt consumers and workers and stunted economic growth.

They also underscore that Biden is willing to use the power of his office and not wait for the tougher grind of congressional action, an approach that is both faster and potentially riskier. This month, he issued an executive order stuffed with 72 initiatives meant to stoke competition in a variety of industries, increase scrutiny of mergers and restrict the widespread practice of forcing workers to sign noncompete agreements.

Outside groups and ideological allies of the administration warn that if Biden hopes to truly follow in the footsteps of his antitrust idols, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt, he will need to push for sweeping legislation to grant new powers to federal regulators, particularly in the tech sector. The core federal antitrust laws, which were written more than a century ago, did not envision the kind of commerce that exists today, where big companies may offer customers low prices but at the expense of competition.