Elizabeth Warren, the presidential candidate who has campaigned on breaking up Silicon Valley giants, says conflicts of interest should keep the Trump administration’s antitrust enforcement chief from overseeing a Justice Department investigation of Google and Apple.
Makan Delrahim, who heads the agency division overseeing the investigations, was paid to lobby for approval of Google’s $3.1 billion takeover of online advertising firm DoubleClick in 2007, Warren wrote in a letter to Delrahim and ethics officials at the Justice Department. Not only did Delrahim earn $100,000 from Google that year, he was paid by Apple in 2006 and 2007 to lobby the George W. Bush administration on patent-reform issues, she said.
“Your past work as a lobbyist for two of the largest and most scrutinized tech companies in the world creates the appearance of a conflict of interest,” Warren, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, wrote to Delrahim. “As the head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice, you should not be supervising investigations into former clients who paid you tens of thousands of dollars to lobby the federal government.”
While the Justice Department acknowledged receiving the letter, a spokesman declined to comment further. Federal law requires government officials to recuse themselves from matters when the circumstances would prompt a reasonable person to question their impartiality, Warren noted.
“Given your extensive and lucrative previous work lobbying the federal government on behalf of Google and Apple, particularly your work to aid Google in its acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., any reasonable person would surely question your impartiality in antitrust matters involving Google,” Warren said.
The Justice Department investigations of Google and Apple and a separate review of broader antitrust issues by congressional Democrats have ramped up the stakes in Washington’s scrutiny of Silicon Valley standouts, a trend likely to gain even more momentum as the 2020 presidential election heats up. If the Justice Department investigation of Google moves ahead, it will likely embolden critics of Facebook, Amazon, and other dominant firms, Justin Post, an analyst with Charlotte, N.C.-based Bank of America, has said in a report.
To break up Google, the Justice Department would have to convince federal courts that doing so is necessary to address anti-competitive concerns, Post noted. It’s a move taken only rarely, he said, as with John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the early 1900s and AT&T in the 1980s.
An attempt to do the same with Microsoft ultimately failed, and this wouldn’t be the first time Google has faced such claims. In 2013, the Federal Trade Commission said it hadn’t found sufficient evidence to show that the company manipulated its search tools to hurt competitors, though it noted that some rivals had been demoted in search results.
In 2018, European regulators fined Google $5.1 billion over complaints that it required phone-makers using its open-source Android operating system to install the Google Search and Google Chrome apps on devices in order to connect to the Google Play app store.
In September, then-U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions — since replaced by William Barr — met with representatives from the offices of 14 state attorneys general to discuss how much leverage antitrust law affords regulators in dealing with tech companies.
