DOJ Suit to Break Up Google Was Years in the Making for Antitrust Chief

The 140-page lawsuit, which Google, a unit of

Alphabet Inc.,

has said includes untrue allegations and misstatements about its business, embraces charges the government once wrote off as far-fetched. In 2008, the Federal Trade Commission, which also polices threats to competition, said Google wouldn’t be able to smother rivals in the digital-advertising world and declined to block its purchase of DoubleClick, an ad broker that the Justice Department now says Google should be forced to sell.

The DOJ’s lawsuit alleges that threats the FTC dismissed actually came to pass. The company built a moat around its business matching web publishers’ supply of ad space with advertisers’ demand, according to the DOJ’s lawsuit. When new companies tried to compete or customers sought better deals, Google responded by blocking rivals from its platform or buying them outright and forcing them to work only with its products, the lawsuit alleges.

Mr. Kanter, 49 years old, is one of the leaders of a movement that sees big technology companies including Google,

Amazon.com Inc.,

Facebook

parent

Meta Platforms Inc.

and

Apple Inc.

as monopolists in the tradition of the 19th-century railroad and oil companies that inspired the original antitrust laws.

“Today there is nobody in the world who knows more about that business and the antitrust issues surrounding it than Jonathan,” said Charles “Rick” Rule, who worked with Mr. Kanter in private practice. “He has been confronting Google for 15 years.”

Mr. Kanter has spent most of his legal career in private practice, sometimes defending corporate clients from government investigations, but also representing companies in pressing law enforcers to go after rivals that have grown dominant. He began looking into Google during the 2000s decade on behalf of Microsoft, which the DOJ in 1998 alleged was an illegal monopolist in the personal-computer market in a lawsuit settled in 2001.

People close to Mr. Kanter, including Mr. Rule, said that while he zealously represented companies out to dethrone Google, he also more broadly espoused reviving antimonopoly enforcement, which waned after the Microsoft case.

News Corp,

the parent company of The Wall Street Journal’s owner, Dow Jones & Co., has been a client of Mr. Kanter.

“Antitrust enforcement is barely on life support,” Mr. Kanter said in 2016 at an event sponsored by the Washington think tank now known as New America. “When was the last time you remember a major antitrust agency bringing a monopolization case?”

Mr. Kanter’s expertise with digital markets and ties to advocacy groups urging the government to take on monopolies made him a popular choice among Democrats to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust enforcement after the 2020 election. He easily won Senate confirmation, with a majority of lawmakers backing his call to police the concentration in the technology, agriculture and healthcare sectors. In the GOP ranks, 29 senators voted against him.

A few days after clearing the Senate’s bar, lawyers for Google told the Justice Department that it should examine whether ethics rules allowed Mr. Kanter to supervise investigations of the company. “We question whether a reasonable person would find AAG Kanter impartial with respect to the Department’s investigations and litigation related to Google,” the letter said. The DOJ’s ad-tech investigation started during the Trump administration.

The DOJ’s review stopped Mr. Kanter from overseeing the Google case for months, leaving the matter in the hands of his top deputy, Doha Mekki. DOJ officials late last year cleared him to deal with the Google case, and Mr. Kanter then took an active role in shaping the new lawsuit against the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

Mr. Kanter has said courts and prior generations of enforcers allowed antitrust law to become too focused on predicted price effects and other analytical measures of competition, while neglecting how the law is supposed to protect Americans from excessive corporate concentration and market power.

“It is a half-empty grocery cart for Americans who can’t afford price hikes and padded margins,” he said in his first speech after taking office. “Or lower salaries and worse working conditions because of employers who face too little competition and workers who do not have sufficient options.”

Mr. Kanter has changed some Justice Department tactics to lead it to litigate more merger cases instead of reaching settlements that allow deals to close with a divestiture, a common approach during the Obama and Trump administrations. Those approaches often miss the mark, he said in a speech last year, adding that the government should block deals it thinks are illegal.

As a result, more companies are willing to fight the DOJ in court.

UnitedHealth Group Inc.

beat the Justice Department in court in September, when a judge ruled that the sale of a claims-processing business was enough to preserve competition.

Federal judges last year rejected the DOJ’s effort to stop U.S. Sugar from buying its rival Imperial Sugar and rebuffed its challenge of

Booz Allen Hamilton Holding Corp.’s

purchase of a competing cybersecurity company. The DOJ won a trial last fall, persuading a judge to block Penguin Random House‘s acquisition of Simon & Schuster, a rival book publisher.

Mr. Kanter, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has said he isn’t deterred by losses. But others said too many of them could undermine the DOJ’s credibility and set back its efforts to beef up enforcement.

“Each time the government loses a case, they have a little less persuasiveness in the next case,” said

Stephen Calkins,

a law professor at Wayne State University. “If several judges rule against the government, that would embolden the next judge to do it.”

In the Google lawsuit, Mr. Kanter opted to seek a jury trial. People familiar with the matter said that he believes antitrust attorneys should have to explain competitive choices and effects in a way that nonexpert jurors can evaluate.

Mr. Kanter grew up in an 18th-floor apartment in Queens, N.Y., where his parents were public-school teachers. His paternal grandfather, a Ukrainian immigrant whose citizenship certificate Mr. Kanter keeps in his office, was a union plumber. Mr. Kanter attended a state university and after law school took a job with the FTC.

After three years in government, he moved to the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson LLP, where he began working with Mr. Rule, who was the DOJ’s antitrust chief during the Reagan administration. The two began working for Microsoft, which included looking into how Google operated, and later moved to another law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft LLP.

In 2016, Mr. Kanter joined Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, where his representation of Google’s opponents such as

Yelp Inc.

clashed with the firm’s work for big tech companies, people familiar with the matter said. Instead of giving up clients, Mr. Kanter quit and was paid for the future income he gave up, the people said. The move netted him a windfall of $20.3 million, according to financial-disclosure records filed when he joined the Justice Department.

Write to Dave Michaels at dave.michaels@wsj.com