President-elect Donald Trump is making it clear he doesn’t intend to ease up on the nation’s technology giants once he is back in the Oval Office.
The latest sign came Wednesday when he said he would nominate Gail Slater, an aide to Vice President-elect JD Vance, to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division.
“Big Tech has run wild for years,” Trump said in a statement announcing the appointment on his Truth Social platform, “stifling competition in our most innovative sector and, as we all know, using its market power to crack down on the rights of so many Americans, as well as those of Little Tech!”
“I was proud to fight these abuses in my First Term, and our Department of Justice’s antitrust team will continue that work under Gail’s leadership,” he added.
The appointment and comments from the president-elect offer a new signal that his administration could press forward with a series of investigations and lawsuits challenging the way the biggest companies in the technology industry, including Google-parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), maintain their dominance.
It was Trump’s first administration that initially sued Google over antitrust concerns, which led to a ruling by a district court judge in August that the tech giant illegally monopolized the search engine market. The DOJ has asked a judge to consider breaking up the company in a separate phase of the trial that won’t wrap up until 2025.
It was also during Trump’s first administration that the Federal Trade Commission sought to unwind Meta’s (META) acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in a case set for trial in April. Trump’s first administration also launched an antitrust investigation into Apple (APPL), leading the Biden administration to sue the iPhone maker earlier this year.
Another ominous sign for Big Tech is that last month Trump nominated Brendan Carr as Federal Communications Commission chair.
Just days before he got that chairmanship appointment, Carr sent letters to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Apple CEO Tim Cook predicting “broad ranging actions to restore Americans’ First Amendment rights” once Trump takes office.
That might include “a review of your companies’ activities as well as third-party organizations and groups that have acted to curtail those rights,” according to a copy of the letter Carr posted to X.
The appointment of Slater to run the DOJ’s antitrust division elevates a figure who was a tech policy adviser at the National Economic Council during Trump’s first term. She previously spent a decade at the Federal Trade Commission, including as an adviser to former Democratic FTC commissioner Julie Brill during President Barack Obama’s administration.
