Trump’s Antitrust Agencies Stay the Course in the First 100 Days

Mark MacCarthy is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University in the Graduate School’s Communication, Culture, & Technology Program and in the Philosophy Department. He is the author of Regulating Digital Industries: How Public Oversight Can Encourage Competition, Protect Privacy, and Ensure Free Speech (2023).

Tech company executives bet heavily on a Donald Trump presidency, apparently expecting that he would grant relief from pending antitrust cases against them. But it has not happened. The enforcement agencies, under new leadership, continue to press on with the cases. This might be the biggest and most surprising tech policy news in the administration’s first hundred days. It suggests that the neo-Brandeisian reforms introduced by the Biden Administration’s competition policy enforcers, under a new, more conservative label, may bring about enduring changes that will promote more competitive and innovative digital markets for the foreseeable future.

The big bet

During the 2024 Presidential race, tech company executives contributed $272.2 million to Trump’s campaign, including $242.6 million from Tesla head Elon Musk and $5.5 million from Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen. Even before the election, Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai, and Amazon’s Andy Jassy made calls and other overtures to the former president in preparation for his second term.

After his victory, tech companies and their CEOs rushed to donate millions to Trump’s inauguration, including $1 million each from Amazon, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Uber, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Apple CEO Tim Cook, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

Companies took other steps to ingratiate themselves with the new administration. For instance, in January, Meta ended its fact-checking program and other efforts to combat political disinformation. The company also repudiated its 2021 decision to deplatform Donald Trump following the violent demonstrations on January 6 at the Capitol by paying $25 million to settle a lawsuit Trump had brought.

Initially, commentators thought these investments in the new administration would pay off. News reports reflected a widespread perception that the new antitrust regime would be much less aggressive. One antitrust attorney, reflecting this consensus, commented, “I won’t be surprised if they find ways to reach some accommodations and we end up seeing more negotiated resolutions and consent decrees.” The agencies, according to this received wisdom, would “ease up on antitrust enforcement and be more receptive to business mergers.”

The reality

FTC chair Lina Khan and Antitrust Division head Jonathan Kanter, who had together spearheaded tough antitrust measures against tech companies during the Biden administration, stepped down before the new administration took office. The new head of the Department of Justice (DOJ) Antitrust Division was Gail Slater, an accomplished attorney with experience in industry, in the previous Trump Administration’s White House, and as a staffer in the Senate office of JD Vance. Andrew Ferguson, a well-respected attorney who had served in several staff positions in Republican offices of the US Senate as well as Solicitor General of Virginia, moved up from Commissioner to Chairman of the Federal Trade Commission.

But the new enforcers did not live up to observers’ expectations of leniency. The reality, as Reuters noted earlier this month, is that the Biden and Trump administrations have shown “an almost unique level of cooperation on the two sides of the political aisle in the prosecution of Big Tech.” Here are some examples.

The Google search case

In March, the DOJ antitrust division, under Slater’s new leadership, submitted a Revised Proposed Final Judgment to the court, containing recommended remedies. This followed a court's finding last year that Google had violated antitrust laws in connection with its search business.

Under the Biden administration, the DOJ filed proposed remedies last year that included mandated divestiture of the industry’s most popular browser, Chrome. Under Slater, the DOJ did back off the earlier recommended remedies to some degree. For instance, the Department said it will “no longer seek the mandatory divestiture of Google’s AI investments in favor of a prior notification for future investments.” But the most important elements of the earlier proposed remedies were still in place, including the key one of mandating the Chrome divestiture.

On April 21, the Department was well-represented at the opening of the trial on remedies in the search case, and it did not back down from this demand for a breakup. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Donald Trump in his 2024 criminal trial in New York City, delivered remarks before the opening arguments, noting that the case was initially brought by the first Trump administration and promising that “as the remedies phase of that case begins, President Trump’s Justice Department will finish the job.” Antitrust chief Slater also spoke and endorsed “robust remedies…to restore and unleash competition.”

In his opening statement, Justice Department lawyer David Dahlquist delivered the specifics. He explicitly called for a divestiture of the Chrome browser to jumpstart competition in search, adding for emphasis that the Department was not there “for a Pyrrhic victory.”

The win in the Google ad tech case

On April 17, 2025, just days before its tough stand in court on remedies in the Google search case, the Department of Justice won another case against Google with a court decision finding that the company had monopolized key elements of the ad tech ecosystem.

In its initial complaint in 2023, the DOJ requested that the court require Google to divest at least its Google Ad Manager, which includes the company’s publisher ad server and ad exchange. This remedy was also considered in 2024 in the context of European antitrust concerns regarding Google’s ad tech holdings.

There is no sign that the DOJ is considering backing off its initial remedy request of divestiture, which will be the subject of an additional trial. Indeed, all indications suggest that the Department’s tough stance will continue. In her statement welcoming the Department’s victory, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to continue strong action against tech companies, saying, “This Department of Justice will continue taking bold legal action to protect the American people from encroachments on free speech and free markets by tech companies.”

The FTC’s Meta case

In December 2020, the Trump Administration’s Federal Trade Commission, under the leadership of Chairman Joseph Sims, sued Facebook (now Meta) for attempting to monopolize the social media market through its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. More than five years later, on April 14, 2025, the trial began. While the details might seem to be a “stroll through a graveyard of dead apps,” as the New York Times described the case, since it concerns events from 2012, it nevertheless might force Meta to divest itself of two services that bring in substantial revenue, a consequential restructuring that would be a devastating blow to the company.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly visited Trump at the White House in March, asking him to get the FTC to pull back from the case. In some administrations, the request for the White House to intervene in a law enforcement action by an independent agency would be summarily rejected as out of bounds. But other actions suggest Trump has no such qualms. In March, he dismissed the two Democratic FTC commissioners, arguing that his theory of the unitary executive gave him full authority to do it and setting up a court case to test the continued independence of independent agencies. So, President Trump’s decision to let the Meta case proceed had to be based on the merits, or on a calculation that an active antitrust case would provide him with more leverage over the company.

Indeed, far from pulling back on the case, the FTC has vigorously prosecuted the case in the first weeks of the trial. FTC chair Ferguson sat in the courtroom to hear the agency’s lead litigator, Daniel Matheson, deliver opening remarks in which he repeated the key claim of the case – that Meta “decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them.” Over the next few days, the FTC lawyers grilled Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, asking them to explain a host of emails and other documents that seemed to buttress the government’s assertions that the company bought out its incipient competitors in violation of the antitrust laws.

Other actions against tech companies

Other actions from the FTC seem to indicate no let-up on antitrust enforcement. In February, Chair Ferguson maintained the revised 2023 merger guidelines agreed to by the previous FTC and DOJ, arguing that “stability is good for the enforcement agencies.” On April 21, the agency brought a consumer protection case against Uber, alleging the company enrolled consumers in a subscription service and charged them without their consent, and made it difficult for users to cancel.

In September 2023, the agency sued Amazon, alleging the company had engaged in a pattern of illegal conduct aimed at preserving its monopolies in online stores and merchant services. In March, the agency’s lawyers faced off against defense counsel in a courtroom in Seattle focused on defining key economic considerations in the case: how to measure market power, the relevant markets in the case, and what evidence is relevant to these questions. Under its new leadership, the agency is pressing on with a case filed by its predecessor.

In March 2024, the DOJ sued Apple, alleging that the company “illegally maintains a monopoly over smartphones by selectively imposing contractual restrictions on, and withholding critical access points from, developers.” Several days after its win in the Google ad tech case, the Department sought to leverage its victory in this case to improve its position in its case against Apple, stating in court that this ruling “supports allowing claims that Apple monopolizes smartphone markets to proceed.” DOJ appears to be far from backing down in this case.

A partial explanation

These cases deserve to proceed on the merits, and the Trump administration antitrust enforcers should be commended and supported in their efforts to pursue them vigorously. There is no indication that the leaders of these agencies are pursuing cases they consider weak for political reasons. But the agencies have raised certain conservative concerns about free speech issues that might be a basis for their continued efforts.

DOJ antitrust chief Slater referred to these free speech issues in her address to the court on the remedies phase of the Google search case, arguing that Google presented a threat “to our freedom of speech, to our freedom of thought, to free digital markets.” Deputy Attorney General Blanche said in his remarks at the opening of the remedies phase, “Google has deplatformed conservative speech and has put its thumb on the scale politically for years.” In her statement welcoming the Department’s victory in the Google ad tech case, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised continued efforts to stop “encroachments on free speech.”

It is unusual for an antitrust agency to weigh in on free speech issues. It suggests that the pursuit of these cases might be part of the administration’s crusade against what conservatives perceive to be bias by liberal tech companies against conservative speakers and organizations.

This was most explicit in the FTC’s February request for information on “Technology Platform Censorship.” The request rehearses many common conservative complaints against unfair content moderation by social media companies and suggests that they “might have resulted from a lack of competition or may have been the product of anti-competitive conduct... or potentially unfair methods of competition.”

This initiative was telegraphed in a December 2024 concurring statement from then Commissioner Ferguson in which he warned that “If the platforms colluded amongst each other to set shared censorship policies, such an agreement would be tantamount to an agreement not to compete on contract terms or product quality.”

Of course, this could just be rhetoric designed to appease the conservative political base that propelled President Trump to political power a second time. Moreover, a speech motivation or effect of these legitimate antitrust cases does not undermine the strong legal and economic arguments that make these cases so persuasive.

It is hard to avoid the inference, however, that the continuation of the antitrust cases against tech companies is motivated in part to ensure that these companies continue to allow conservative voices full access to their platforms. If we are looking for an explanation of why the Trump administration surprisingly continued the tough antitrust stance of the Biden administration, this might be part of the answer.

An earlier version of this post stated that Andrew Ferguson was formerly Attorney General of Virginia. He was Solicitor General. We regret the error.