As Pam Bondi settles in at the Department of Justice, our intrepid new Attorney General will need to set priorities and refocus thousands of prosecutors and investigators, in the process bringing to justice countless evildoers who the Biden Administration, for its own narrow reasons, decided to overlook or, in some cases, encourage and reward. The organizational and logistical challenge that the DOJ's new masters face is daunting, to say the least.
Among the difficult decisions that top DOJ officials will need to make is to what degree to pursue antitrust cases, many of them opened under the Biden Administration, to completion, or whether some represent dead ends that should best be left to wither on the vine. In the process, the DOJ must protect American capitalism from anti-competitive collusion and harmful monopolies. Still, it must not overexert itself in a way that stifles innovation and the natural tendency towards consolidation in a dog-eat-dog global economy. The DOJ must, therefore, strike a middle ground, but where exactly is the “middle” to be found in this rapidly evolving economic and corporate landscape?
I would like to suggest that one clear case where antitrust action is urgently required is with Alphabet/Google, one of the world's biggest companies. If Google were only a search engine, its monopoly position would be obvious and alarming, but it is much more than that. Google, through Android, controls the operating systems of most smartphones and tablets. Google, through YouTube, dominates video sharing. Google, through Gmail, controls a large fraction of email traffic. Google, through Chrome, boasts the world's most popular web browser. I could go on, but the point is made: Alphabet/Google is vast, and its towering position in the digital marketplace allows it to dictate terms to many of its customers. Worse, Goggle's ideological commitment to wokeness and progressivism has led the company to leverage its influence to persecute and censor conservatives and dissidents and to amplify false narratives that serve the interests of Google's bottom line, as well as safeguarding the power and privileges of the left-leaning establishment. Alphabet/Google, in short, is not just a threat to capitalism – it is a threat to democracy, freedom, and human dignity. The DOJ's proposed solution to this problem – forcing the sale of the Chrome browser – does not go nearly far enough. Google should be thoroughly partitioned. Each of its major business enterprises, outlined above, should be spun off into a separate company. That is the least that Alphabet/Google deserves for the harm it has already done to our economy and our polity, and it is the least that we can do to protect ourselves from future damage.
By contrast, the DOJ's lawsuit to prevent a telecom merger between HPE and Juniper Networks is a good example of an antitrust action that need not go forward. Neither HPE nor Juniper are household names, and neither threaten the integrity of world capitalism or our constitutional rights. Quite the contrary: there are compelling arguments why further consolidation is needed in the U.S. telecom sector to give it a fighting chance to compete with massive Chinese companies like Huawei and ZTE, particularly in the all-important arena of 5G infrastructure. Huawei, which, according to Congress, poses a grave national security threat, already controls 30% of the world market for telecommunications equipment. The full authority and unlimited financial resources of the Chinese state back Huawei. By contrast, the biggest U.S. telecom company, Cisco, lags far behind. If we don't want to hand 5G hegemony to a hostile communist-led superpower, therefore, we had better start supporting our own telecom innovators by, at a minimum, getting out of their way when they make necessary business decisions that could protect our national security, create thousands of jobs, and keep the Chinese on their toes in what will soon be a $13 trillion per year industry. That's a no-brainer.
It's early days at the Trump/Bondi DOJ, but there's plenty of reason for optimism. There's hope that lawfare and weaponization are in their death throes, for instance, and that many bad guys who Team Biden let skate will soon face justice. However, many complex legal issues confronting the DOJ are more subtle than this. On the antitrust front, it isn't a question of “yea” or “nay” but of when to strike surgically to ensure that democracy stays strong, our rights and national security are protected, and our free enterprise system remains fair and competitive. It's not a simple task, but it sure is gratifying to have Pam Bondi at the helm and Merrick Garland in the rearview mirror.
Dr. Nicholas L. Waddy is an Associate Professor of History at SUNY Alfred and blogs at: www.waddyisright.com. He appears on the Newsmakers show on WLEA/WYSL.