By Jody Godoy
(Reuters) – U.S. Department of Justice antitrust head Jonathan Kanter said on Tuesday that he will step down on Friday, capping off a three-year tenure in which he aimed to reinvigorate competition law in the U.S..
Kanter and his counterpart at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, have sought to revive antitrust enforcement in the U.S. as a check on corporate power, drawing praise from Democrats and some Republicans.
“Plutocracy is its own kind of dictatorship,” Kanter said in a farewell address on Tuesday. “When companies larger and more powerful than most world governments threaten individual liberty with coercive private taxation and regulation, it threatens our way of life,” he said.
Some attorneys and business groups have criticised Khan and Kanter’s agenda and supported a return to a more limited view of antitrust that has prevailed for four decades.
But President-elect Donald Trump’s antitrust picks are not seen as likely to drastically curtail enforcement.
Gail Slater, an aide to incoming Vice President JD Vance, is poised to take over for Kanter once she is confirmed. Before being tapped as Trump’s running mate, Vance praised Khan’s efforts and said that corporations can engage in “tyrannical” behavior.
At least until Trump takes office, Kanter’s deputy Doha Mekki will lead the antitrust division. After that point, Trump could appoint a different acting head of the division.
Kanter has kicked the DOJ’s antitrust division into high gear, bringing cases against Apple, Alphabet’s Google, Ticketmaster and Visa, and winning a groundbreaking legal victory over Google in a case over its dominance in online search that was brought during President-elect Donald Trump’s first administration.
The DOJ under Kanter also brought cases that successfully block a tie up between JetBlue and American, JetBlue’s proposed $3.8 billion merger with Spirit Airlines and the $2.2 billion merger of Penguin Random House, the world’s largest book publisher, and rival Simon & Schuster.
Kanter warned in his speech that the DOJ’s antitrust work faces an existential threat without full access to funding from the merger filing fees it collects.
(Reporting by Jody Godoy in New York; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
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