In his decades in Washington – as a Senate staffer, DOJ official in the Bush administration, lawyer in the private sector and later an aide to Trump in the White House – Delrahim has developed a reputation of being eager to debate ideas in public, on occasion taking the unexpected view.
One of President Donald Trump’s top regulators is raising the temperature on Silicon Valley.
Makan Delrahim, who heads the Justice Department’s antitrust division, has spent months laying out a case for greater scrutiny of the country’s powerful technology industry, making the argument in speeches from Chicago to Rome.
He faces an early test Tuesday when a federal judge rules on his first big action, a lawsuit to block the $85 billion merger between AT&T and Time Warner. The Trump administration’s argument, that the deal could stifle competition and raise prices for consumers, is a departure from the traditional GOP hands-off approach to business – and Delrahim is making it clear that the tech industry’s practices are under his microscope as well.
“At the end of the day, my job is policing the free market system to make sure you have competition to create innovation and ultimately help consumers," he said in an interview Monday with POLITICO.
Delrahim’s stance is the latest example of a Trump administration willing to upend Republican orthodoxy on everything from trade and tariffs to propping up the coal industry.
And his rhetoric – he told an audience at the University of Chicago in April that "enforcers must take vigorous action" if digital platforms harm competition – is being closely watched in the tech industry amid fears that Washington’s souring view on Silicon Valley could eventually result in a crackdown.
The industry was once the darling of both parties. But it has become a punching bag of late, as Trump regularly lambastes Amazon, Facebook grapples with controversies over user privacy and Russian election interference, and conservatives allege social media are biased against their views.
Delrahim’s talk is raising hopes among some progressives that they have an unlikely ally in the Trump administration. Still, those agitating for a tougher approach to tech companies say they’re not clear whether the antitrust chief is planning to take action – or simply floating ideas.
“We’re still waiting to see whether, under his leadership, the antitrust division will use its significant investigatory tools and enforcement tools to address those concerns head on,” said Lina Khan, director of legal policy for the Open Markets Institute, which advocates for checks on the tech sector.
Trump’s opposition to the AT&T-Time Warner deal and his animosity toward Time Warner-owned CNN, which he accuses of spreading “fake news," has loomed over the merger trial, leading critics to suggest the Justice Department is taking a politically motivated approach to the case.
Delrahim takes umbrage at such suggestions, saying they’re untrue and ginned up in part by AT&T.
“Politics plays no role in our law enforcement of antitrust cases. It doesn’t, it shouldn’t, and it won’t," he said.
Asked point-blank if Trump’s opinions influenced his decision to bring a lawsuit to block the AT&T deal, Delrahim responded, “No, of course not.”
While AT&T-Time Warner would combine two companies that don’t compete directly – a so-called vertical merger that has passed muster with regulators in the past – Delrahim has outlined a different approach. He’s shown a preference for addressing competition concerns by either requiring companies to restructure or blocking such deals altogether.
He’s a harsh critic of government-imposed conditions on deals dictating specific business practices, saying they cause regulators to “start veering into trying to second guess what the market will be and what consumers will want five years, seven years, 10 years down the line."
In his decades in Washington – as a Senate staffer, DOJ official in the Bush administration, lawyer in the private sector and later an aide to Trump in the White House – Delrahim has developed a reputation of being eager to debate ideas in public, on occasion taking the unexpected view.
“He’s willing to stir the pot. He thinks independently. And he will surprise people,” says former Democratic FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, a partner at the law firm Davis Polk & Wardwell who served with Delrahim as a staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee in the late 1990s.
Delrahim argues that his job isn’t to pick winners or losers in the market, but to police the private sector so that consumers get what they want and government won’t be moved to impose suffocating regulations on it.
He’s floated new metrics for judging whether an online company is good for consumers, arguing that traditional factors like low pricing are less relevant in the age of free services like Gmail and Facebook. One possible metric, he says, are the scores used by marketers to determine the likelihood of users recommending a product to a friend.
When it comes to Facebook, Delrahim said he has concerns about its handling of user data – “There’s no question I care about my personal privacy. I think most consumers do, if they actually understand it” – but said the company’s behavior isn’t necessarily anti-competitive.
The way for his office to promote privacy among online services, he said, is to make sure there’s a clear path for Snapchat or another competitor to offer a Facebook alternative for consumers who place a priority on privacy and "the market is free for such a thing to develop.”
Despite his growing profile in the tech industry, Delrahim cautioned that the Justice Department only brings cases when there’s evidence to back them up.
"It’s really easy to be out there telling people to go to hell. Getting them is a whole different story, and that’s my job," he said, paraphrasing Jack Valenti, the legendary head of the Motion Picture Association of America. "You have to have the credible evidence, a sound economic theory, and you have to have a case you can win. Otherwise everything goes to dust."
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