President-elect Donald Trump is making it clear he has no plans to soften up the country’s tech giants once he returns to the Oval Office.
The latest sign came Wednesday when he said he would appoint Gail Slater, an aide to newly elected Vice President J.D. Vance, to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
“Big Tech has run amok for years,” Trump said in a statement announcing the appointment on his Truth Social platform, “suppressing competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to address people’s rights. so many Americans, as well as those from Little Tech!”
“I was proud to fight these abuses during my first term, and our Justice Department’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership,” he added.
The president-elect’s nomination and comments offer a new signal that his administration could move forward with a series of investigations and lawsuits challenging the way the tech industry’s biggest companies, including Google (GOOG, GOOGL), maintain their dominance .
It was the first Trump administration to initially sue Google over antitrust concerns, leading to a district court ruling in August that the tech giant was illegally monopolizing the search engine market. The DOJ has asked a judge to consider breaking up the company in a separate sentence of the lawsuit that won’t be completed until 2025.
It was also during Trump’s first administration that the Federal Trade Commission tried to unwind Meta’s (META) acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in a case that was set to go to trial in April. The first Trump administration also launched an antitrust investigation into Apple (APPL), leading the Biden administration to sue the iPhone maker earlier this year.
In another ominous sign for Big Tech, Trump last month nominated Brendan Carr to chair the Federal Communications Commission.
Just days before he was appointed chairman, Carr sent letters to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook predicting “wide-ranging actions to protect America’s First Amendment.” rights’ once Trump comes to power. .
That could include “a review of your company’s activities, as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to restrict these rights,” according to a copy of the letter Carr posted to X.
Slater’s appointment to lead the DOJ’s antitrust division elevates a figure who served as a technical policy adviser at the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term. She previously spent a decade at the Federal Trade Commission, including as an adviser to former Democratic FTC Commissioner Julie Brill during President Barack Obama’s administration.
The FTC shares with the DOJ responsibility for enforcing the nation’s antitrust laws.
In the private sector, Slater held positions at Fox Corp. and Roku. She also worked for the now-dismantled lobbying organization Internet Association, which advocated for the country’s most powerful technology companies.
The companies included Amazon (AMZN), Airbnb (ABNB), Facebook (META), Google, eBay (EBAY), Microsoft (MSFT), Spotify (SPOT), Uber (UBER), X and Zillow (Z).
Slater’s boss Vance has expressed his admiration for the approach of FTC Chair Lina Khan, who has built a reputation for aggressively pursuing lawsuits and investigations targeting the biggest tech giants.
Last week, Bloomberg reported that Khan had launched a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into Microsoft’s cloud computing and artificial intelligence businesses.
It is still unknown whether Trump will want to replace Khan, and with whom. Slater acted as an advisor to the administration on this matter.
There is also no guarantee that Khan’s replacement will take a similar position, or continue her activities.
“We don’t know who will succeed Lina Khan, but you can be sure it won’t be anyone with Lina Khan’s philosophy,” said former FTC member and antitrust professor Robert Lande of the University of Baltimore Law School.
Trump has sent mixed messages about how far he is willing to go to hold tech companies accountable.
During his campaign, he was asked whether he supported breaking up Google as an antidote to unhealthy competition in the search engine market. Trump suggested that Google’s punishment could be carried out without forcing it to sell off parts of its empire.
“What you can do without breaking it up is make it more fair,” Trump said in an Oct. 15 interview. The former president described Google’s search engine as “rigged” and expressed concern that the fallout for Google in the case could favor China.
On Wednesday, Google’s CEO Pichai said of Trump that “in my conversations with him, he is definitely very focused on American competitiveness, especially in technology, including AI.”
When asked at a New York Times DealBook summit in New York whether Trump’s election changes the dynamics of Google’s antitrust case, he said, “This is a DOJ case, and the case is already in court,” noting that it began during Trump’s first term.
“So I don’t have any specific insights into that.” The company, he added, will “defend ourselves there.”
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
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