President Trump’s antitrust cops are friendlier thus far about mergers than their predecessors, but they are refusing to let up on one prominent priority of the Biden administration: monopoly prosecutions of the nation’s best-known tech giants.
Six months into Trump’s second term in office, his antitrust regulators have already given the green light to more than 100 merger transactions, feeding the optimism of Wall Street bankers that new dealmaking will have widespread support in Washington, D.C.
In June, antitrust enforcers gave a go-ahead to three deals worth a combined $63 billion, including candy giant Mars’ $36 billion takeover of Kellanova (K), and the DOJ announced a settlement with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) allowing it to acquire software developer Juniper.
This month, the DOJ announced that it closed a major investigation into telecom giant T-Mobile’s (TMUS) $4 billion acquisition of USCellular assets that allowed the tie up to proceed.
A T-Mobile store in San Diego, Calif. (Photo by Kevin Carter/Getty Images) ·Kevin Carter via Getty Images
Administration officials claim the approvals are not a free pass because many have required pre-merger divestments or licensing requirements.
Yet at the same time, Trump’s DOJ and FTC have shown no plans to relent in a series of high-stakes government prosecutions targeting the competitive tactics of Google (GOOG), Amazon (AMZN), Meta (META), and Apple (AAPL).
Nor have they shown any signs of unwinding investigations into Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), and OpenAI (OPAI.PVT).
That’s despite efforts by the CEOs of these companies to curry favor with Trump, with many showing up in person for the president’s inauguration in January. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg tried unsuccessfully this spring to stop a government trial against his company from going forward.
“The criticism coming into this administration is that all of these Big Tech CEOs that were at the inauguration were going to get sweetheart deals; that they were going to settle these cases for pennies on the dollar,” said Slade Bond, former principal deputy assistant attorney general in the Biden administration’s Office of Legislative Affairs.
Guests including Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and Elon Musk attended the Inauguration of Donald J. Trump in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on Jan. 20. (Julia Demaree Nikhinson – Pool/Getty Images) ·Pool via Getty Images
“And that just hasn’t happened.”
The Trump approach to new mergers, however, is “different,” Bond said, explaining that Trump’s regulators have made it clear that they’re more open to structuring deals in a way that Biden’s DOJ antitrust head Jonathan Kanter and former FTC chair Lina Khan were not.
Arnold & Porter said the latest approvals clearly demonstrate the administration’s willingness to negotiate.
The approach with mergers is “a noteworthy shift away from the prior administration,” according to a recent note published by the Washington D.C.-based law firm.
And the shift demonstrates the administration’s willingness to negotiate, it added. “FTC and DOJ Antitrust leadership resisted pre-litigation merger settlements during the Biden administration, choosing to litigate to challenge deals instead of accepting remedies.”
But “the new Trump administration leadership appears willing to accept divestitures to resolve its competitive concerns, providing an opportunity for merging parties to avoid litigation to get deals done.”
The more flexible approach to mergers is not stopping Trump’s enforcers from pressing ahead with dozens of prosecutions and investigations into the ways that dominant Big Tech companies are hanging onto their market power.
The DOJ, along with a group of US states, is waiting for judges to rule on their requests to force Google to break up its empire, after prevailing in two landmark cases against Google in 2024 and April this year.
In each case — one filed during Trump’s first term in office and one brought by the Biden administration — the DOJ and states have pushed for remedies that would remake Google’s search engine and online advertising empires.
In another ongoing case that Trump’s FTC took to trial against Meta in April, regulators are awaiting a California federal judge’s decision on their claims that the social media titan leveraged its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to box out competitors.
Amazon and Apple are also in the new administration’s antitrust crosshairs.
Apple CEO Tim Cook seen behind US President Donald Trump and US Vice President JD Vance after the two were sworn into office at an inauguration ceremony in the rotunda of the United States Capitol on Jan. 20. (Shawn Thew-Pool/Getty Images) ·Pool via Getty Images
In two federal lawsuits brought by the Biden administration and inherited by Trump’s FTC, regulators allege that Amazon illegally maintained its monopoly in the markets for online superstores and online marketplace services, and deceived customers into renewing Amazon Prime subscriptions.
Biden’s DOJ accused Apple of violating antitrust laws in an ongoing federal case in New Jersey, now under the direction of Trump’s DOJ. The complaint alleges that the iPhone maker abused its dominance in the smartphone market.
One top Trump antitrust official, Roger Alford, said in May that Trump’s regulators were focused on prosecuting anticompetitive behavior that impacts everyday Americans.
In addition to the cases against Big Tech, he applauded Biden-era antitrust lawsuits filed against private equity firm Thoma Bravo’s real estate management software developer RealPage and event promoter and ticket distributor Live Nation Entertainment’s Ticketmaster (LIV).
Alford said to expect the administration’s regulators to focus on protecting competition in markets where average Americans spend their money, like housing, transportation, insurance, and entertainment.
“So bring cases in those kinds of categories,” he said. “I think the world knows we’re going to be very serious about antitrust enforcement.”
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on X @alexiskweed.
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