Top Antitrust Cop in Spotlight Over Big Tech Inquiry
Top Antitrust Cop in Spotlight Over Big Tech Inquiry
Makan Delrahim plans to explore concerns about the power
of Silicon Valley
By Brent Kendall July 7, 2019 7:00 am ET
WASHINGTON—The Justice Department official expected to
lead an antitrust investigation into Google’s business practices says he favors
taking a broad view of whether Big Tech dominance is harming innovation,
product quality and consumer choice.
Makan Delrahim, a 49-year-old assistant U.S. attorney
general, has been in the spotlight since The Wall Street Journal reported May
31 that his antitrust division was planning an expansive probe of Alphabet
Inc.’s Google. It is an investigation that could shape the search giant’s
future and the broader competitive landscape for a generation.
In his first extended interview since then, Mr. Delrahim
said that today’s dominant tech companies have developed an array of innovative
products that consumers enjoy, from search to social media, many of them with
low or no prices. But that didn’t mean there aren’t issues for the government
to potentially address.
“You have some of these technology companies touching so
many aspects of people’s lives,” he said. “The question is: Do they harm
competition, and if so, how?”
Mr. Delrahim said he sees interest across the political
spectrum in addressing concerns about the power of Silicon Valley and, more
broadly, about declining competition. “The call for stronger antitrust
enforcement is bipartisan,” he said. “This transcends political parties or
views.”
The Justice Department hasn’t confirmed that it is
preparing a Google investigation and Mr. Delrahim steered away from discussing
any one company’s specific business practices. Mr. Delrahim, who came to the
Justice Department after a nine-month stint in the White House counsel’s
office, acknowledged that any Big Tech examination could present challenges,
including for government resources.
“But we have incredibly smart lawyers…that really
understand how the law applies to these industries,” he said. “I absolutely
have all the confidence that we have the people to dig into this.”
Mr. Delrahim immigrated to the U.S. from Iran at the age
of 9, during the revolution there. He learned English and spent his teenage
years in suburban Los Angeles, working weekends and summers at his father’s
service station.
Known widely around Washington as just Makan, he has
served in various roles in the executive and legislative branches, including as
a top aide to former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R., Utah) and as a deputy assistant
attorney general in the Justice Department’s antitrust division during the
George W. Bush administration. He also spent more than a decade in private
practice, a stint that included antitrust counseling and lobbying.
He once advised Google on its acquisition of internet ad
company DoubleClick in 2007, a gig that has prompted Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a
Democratic presidential candidate and top Big Tech critic, to call for Mr.
Delrahim to recuse himself in any Google probe.
The Justice Department hasn’t responded publicly to Ms.
Warren but Mr. Delrahim has said generally that he gets advice from career
department ethics officials on any potential conflicts.
Mr. Delrahim joined the Trump administration as a White
House counsel, where he was a central figure in shepherding Supreme Court
Justice Neil Gorsuch through the confirmation process. In two years as Justice
Department antitrust chief, Mr. Delrahim has crafted a blend of antitrust
enforcement that follows neither the traditional Republican nor Democratic
playbooks, at times confounding both his supporters and critics.
Seven weeks into the job, he brought a lawsuit
challenging AT&T Inc.’s acquisition of Time Warner, which the government
lost. Now, he is engaged in down-to-the-wire deliberations over whether to
allow T-Mobile US Inc. to buy wireless rival Sprint Corp., a decision viewed as
one of the most important of his tenure.
Several large mergers have passed muster under his
watch—with strings attached—such as Bayer AG’s acquisition of Monsanto Co., in
which the antitrust division mandated the sale of a record $9 billion in assets
to preserve competition.
In several instances Mr. Delrahim has favored
middle-ground solutions, an approach that could inform any Big Tech case.
While some lawmakers at both ends of the political
spectrum have called for the splitting of megacompanies into parts, such a
drastic remedy is rare, and Mr. Delrahim has professed to be a fan of the
compromise outcome in the last major monopolization case the Justice Department
brought—against Microsoft Corp. in 1998.
After a circuitous route through the court system,
including one initial ruling that mandated a breakup, Microsoft reached a
settlement with the government to change some aspects of its commercial
behavior but stay intact.
Mr. Delrahim has said the settlement stimulated the very
competition and innovation that led to the rise of Google and others that he is
now charged with potentially reining in.
Mr. Delrahim throughout his tenure has been adamant that
politics plays no role in his antitrust decision making, and that he hasn’t
been steered by the White House.
“Still there has been no influence in our decisions,” he
said in the interview.
President Trump’s public comments continue to complicate
Mr. Delrahim’s tenure. Mr. Trump pledged as a candidate to block AT&T’s
deal for Time Warner, which owned CNN, a network the president has denounced.
Recently the president suggested that customers stop using AT&T’s services
to force CNN to pull back on “negative” coverage.
Separately, the president last month accused Google of
favoring Democrats and trying to “rig” the election. “We should be suing Google
and Facebook and all that, which perhaps we will,” Mr. Trump said in a Fox
Business Network interview.
The whirlwind of the past couple of years has left some
in the antitrust division dissatisfied, according to people familiar with the
matter, who say there is a trust gap between some career staffers and Mr.
Delrahim’s front office, which runs a tightly controlled, top-down
decision-making process.
Mr. Delrahim said he recently began holding a meeting
each week with every career head of the different sections within the antitrust
division to talk about pending business, as well as implementing a quarterly
question-and-answer session for anyone in the division who wants to attend.
The Justice Department’s planned push on Big Tech comes
as Mr. Delrahim has a new boss, U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who in his
January confirmation hearings cited an interest in antitrust issues, especially
in the tech sector.
After Mr. Barr’s confirmation, many in D.C. antitrust
circles speculated that Mr. Delrahim’s days at the antitrust division could be
numbered.
The two men had clashed during the AT&T case, when
Mr. Barr was a member of Time Warner’s board and one of a handful of people in
a confrontational meeting with Mr. Delrahim two weeks before the department
sued. They later offered conflicting recollections of the meeting in legal
papers, with Mr. Barr questioning the Justice Department’s motivations.
But after settling in at Justice, Mr. Barr, who has known
Mr. Delrahim for years, sought out his antitrust chief, put his arm around him
and assured him he was on solid footing at the department, people familiar with
the matter said.
“I have no intentions to leave,” Mr. Delrahim said.
—Keach Hagey and Sadie Gurman contributed to this
article.
Comments
Post a Comment