Person attributes
Jonathan Kanter is an antitrust lawyer and the founder of The Kanter Law Group. He is also the 2021 nominee for Assistant Attorney General of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division.
Kanter attended the University of Albany, where he achieved a Bachelor of Arts Degree in 1995. He then earned his Juris Doctor degree at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law in 1998.
After earning his degrees, Kanter worked in several law offices over the years. He was first an attorney at the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) from 1998 to 2000. He then worked as an associate at Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson until 2007, at which point he was a partner at Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft until 2016, spending nearly ten years there. After that, Kanter was partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison where he also co-chaired its Antitrust Group. In 2020, he founded his own law firm, The Kanter Law Group, an antitrust advocacy boutique. Some of his law firm clients include Spotify, Nike, Uber, Microsoft, Yelp, and Getty Images.
Kanter is an outspoken critic of several "big tech" companies, particularly Google. He has represented both small and large companies against Google before, pertaining to antitrust concerns. If confirmed as Assistant Attorney General of the DOJ, Kanter will take over the DOJ's lawsuit against Google, which is over their claim of Google's "unlawful monopoly" as a search engine provider and advertisement platform.
Kanter is also a strong advocate for antitrust laws. He has made many public comments about the importance of antitrust laws, some in general and some addressed to the US government and big tech companies, criticizing them for not upholding the laws and calling for stronger ones to be passed. In 2016, he stated,
Antitrust enforcement is barely on life support. When was the last time you can remember a major antitrust agency bringing a monopolization case? The reason you can't remember it is because they haven't done it."
In a 2018 Senate hearing, Kanter said that US government policymakers should "vigorously explore new questions in antitrust to ensure that US antitrust law remains relevant to the realities of today's economy and society [...] Antitrust enforcement, as opposed to regulation, is also a far more precise and effective tool to protect the free market. In another Senate hearing in 2020, Kanter said on the topic of antitrust issues, "We have laws. Those laws are in place. Let's enforce them. Let's enforce them regularly with vigor, with passion, creativity, and meaning."
Kanter has been recognized among various national publications as one of the top antitrust lawyers in the country, including by Chambers USA, The Legal 500, Law360, and the Washingtonian magazine.
In 2012, the firm Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft received the "Merger Control Matter of the Year - Europe" award at the Global Competition Review Awards for the work that Kanter and his partner Charles Rule did as antitrust counsels to Microsoft in its Skype acquisition.
On July 20, 2021, Kanter was nominated by President Joe Biden to be the Attorney Assistant General of the United States Department of Justice Antitrust Division. On October 6, 2021, a Senate confirmation hearing was held on the decision of Kanter's nomination. A decision is expected to be made by late 2021 or early 2022.
