Shortly after Jonathan Kanter took over the Justice Department's antitrust division in November 2021, the agency secured an additional $50 million to investigate monopolies, break up criminal cartels and block mergers.
To celebrate, Mr. Kanter purchased a giant check, placed it outside his office and wrote on the check's memo line: “Break 'Em Up.”
Mr. Kanter, 50, has been pushing that philosophy ever since, becoming the chief architect of the most significant effort in decades to combat the concentration of power in corporate America. On Thursday, he got his biggest break when the Justice Department filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple. In the 88-page lawsuit, the government argued that Apple violated antitrust laws through its practices to increase customers' dependence on its iPhones and reduce the likelihood that they would switch to competing devices.
This lawsuit joins two Justice Department antitrust cases against Google alleging the company illegally propped up monopolies. Mr. Kanter's employees have also challenged numerous corporate mergers, including lawsuits to stop JetBlue Airways from buying Spirit Airlines.
“We want to help real people by making sure our antitrust laws work for workers, consumers, business owners and protecting our democratic values,” Mr. Kanter said in an interview in January. He declined to comment on the Google cases and other active litigation.
At a news conference about the Apple lawsuit on Thursday, Mr. Kanter compared the lawsuit to previous Justice Department lawsuits against Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft. The aim of the lawsuit is to “protect the market for the innovations that we cannot yet perceive,” he said.
Mr. Kanter and Lina Khan, the chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission, have now taken action against four of the six largest publicly traded technology companies in a bid to rein in the industry's power. The FTC has separately filed antitrust lawsuits against Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, and Amazon.
But Mr. Kanter and Ms. Khan are excited to see how far they can go with their efforts. The November election could force President Biden from the White House, taking Mr. Kanter and Ms. Khan with him.
More than two dozen people who know Mr. Kanter, including current and former Justice Department employees, described his two-decade rise. Some spoke anonymously to describe confidential government deliberations and presentations.
Mr. Kanter grew up in the apartment in Queens, NY, where his parents still live. After graduating from Forest Hills High School, he attended the State University of New York at Albany and then law school at Washington University in St. Louis.
“I grew up in a neighborhood with teachers, police officers, taxi drivers, shopkeepers and people who worked really hard,” he said, and did so with the “belief that the American dream really does provide opportunity and opportunity to achieve a better life .” future generations.”
He said he associates antitrust enforcement with those values because “it's about making sure that these opportunities are available to everyone and that people can succeed on their own.”
After graduating from law school, Mr. Kanter worked at the FTC before moving to major law firms such as Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft and Paul Weiss. At times he represented Microsoft. As the company launched an offensive against Google, which had dabbled in online search, Mr. Kanter promoted in Washington that Google deserved additional scrutiny.
He later made similar arguments for other Google critics, such as News Corp and Yelp, and said regulators should also investigate other tech giants. At the same time, he defended company mergers in individual industries.
Mr. Kanter's work against some of the tech giants won him fans among those who believed that antitrust laws were an essential tool for making the economy fairer.
“Here was an insider who had also come to very similar conclusions,” Ms. Khan said in an interview in November.
After his nomination was confirmed by Mr. Biden, Mr. Kanter, who often favors formal peak lapels and once wore an A. Lange & Söhne dress watch, which retails for $34,500, in a photo shoot, presented his plan to his staff the antitrust division, people with knowledge of the presentation said.
Mr. Kanter branded his initiatives with catchy code names. An agency plan to quickly intervene in ongoing legal cases earned the Gen Z nickname “Real Time AF,” short for real-time antitrust filings. He called a plan to investigate high-level corporate executives the “Billionaire Accountability Project.”
Mr. Kanter told his team that he wanted the department to be able to handle 30 civil lawsuits and another 30 criminal cases at any time. He called the plan “30 for 30.”
The agency was already overburdened and some employees felt Mr. Kanter was setting unreasonable goals, people familiar with the matter said.
His time in private practice also cast a shadow ahead. Mr. Kanter did not initially work on lawsuits against Google because he had represented competitors for years. When he can't work on cases, including challenging JetBlue's purchase of Spirit, they are led by his chief deputy, Doha Mekki.
Still, Mr. Kanter has been proactive in suing the tech giants.
When a Google antitrust case over online search went to trial last year, he urged government lawyers to argue louder and louder that the sheer scale of the company's operations consolidated its power and made it harder for its rivals to deal with two people compete knowledge of the matter said. That idea was a central theme when the case was heard in a Washington court last fall. (A decision is expected later this year.)
Mr. Kanter also oversaw the final months of the Justice Department's investigation into Google's control over online advertising technology. He argued to his colleagues that the government should push for the lawsuit to be decided by a jury rather than a judge, which is the norm in similar civil cases, a person familiar with the matter said. A jury trial is scheduled to begin in September.
Mr. Kanter's work has come under scrutiny from critics who question whether he and his compatriots are pushing the boundaries of antitrust law too far and harming the economy.
William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and former chairman of the FTC, said Mr. Kanter had not yet secured a victory in the kind of sweeping monopoly lawsuit the agency pursued against Apple and Google.
“In some ways he’s still looking for the more prominent trophy for the mantel,” he said. “If you win one of these monopolization cases, you can have the rest of the decade off.”
In the January interview, Mr. Kanter defended his push to change the agency's operations. He said the world has changed radically in the last 30 years. People communicate via new media, get their information from different sources and trade on emerging platforms.
“It is important that we recognize these changes if we are to have fit-for-purpose antitrust enforcement in a modern economy,” he said. “And then we adapt to make sure we are enforcing the letter of the antitrust law and applicable precedent. But we are enforcing the law in a way that reflects the realities of today’s economy.”
Tripp Mickle contributed reporting from San Francisco. Jack Begg contributed to the research.