Gail Slater and Google – Doubling Down on Biden’s Progressive Antitrust Policies

March 11, 2025

Did Jonathan Kanter and Lina Khan actually leave the Justice Department Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission? Or are they in tiny offices on the roofs of each building, quietly directing the policies of the Trump Administration below?

To be sure, there are two new sheriffs in town, Gail Slater at Justice and Andrew Ferguson at FTC. After the election, business sighed with relief and a bull market pranced. By no means did anyone expect the Trump Administration to be a pushover on antitrust. But at least with the election of a businessman as president, reason, economics, and the law would be restored.

So Slater and Ferguson were expected to serve President Trump’s vision of deregulation and retrenchment of progressive management of the economy to unleash growth and animal spirits in the marketplace.

Two months later, the stock market is crashing, and these Trump-appointed regulators are doubling down on dumb.

They adopted – wholesale – the Biden Administration’s merger guidelines, the cornerstone for progressive antitrust that fails to mention the consumer welfare standard, and only mentions “consumers” at all in several footnotes. Now Slater is continuing the Biden Administration’s over-the-top effort to dismantle Google.

Biden progressives like Tim Wu advocated for Google’s divestiture from its popular Chrome web browser and its Android operating system, while also forcing it to give away its research into AI. Never mind that Google has its hands full in competition from ChatGPT in an AI world of cutthroat competition. Or that even in search, younger users are turning to social media instead of Google, especially for visual content.

Now Slater is moving down this same progressive path, seeking to force the world’s most popular search engine to divest its most popular browser. This is like asking Coca-Cola to divest what we recently called “classic Coke,” or Nike to drop its Air Force 1.

It is so far hard to see much change at all in antitrust policy from Biden’s progressive agenda. Given President Trump’s business background, this cannot be what he wanted.