Attorney General’s Antitrust Power Play Is Just What Trump Wants
Illustration: Félix Decombat for Bloomberg Businessweek
The decision didn’t sit well with U.S. Attorney General William Barr. His antitrust chief in May had agreed to open probes of Google and Apple Inc., handing over Facebook and Amazon to the Federal Trade Commission, the rival antitrust agency a few blocks away.
Two months later, Barr did an end run around the agreement and made a grab for authority over all four tech giants. The Department of Justice announced wide-ranging reviews of the top social media, retail, and search platforms, which means Facebook Inc. and possibly Amazon.com Inc. will undergo parallel investigations by two agencies. The announcement enraged Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who oversees antitrust on the Senate Judiciary Committee. In a hearing, Lee berated FTC Chairman Joe Simons and the Justice Department’s antitrust chief, Makan Delrahim, for piling on the companies with overlapping investigations.