4-Your-Eyes-Only
JPMorgan believes that a potential second Donald Trump U.S. administration could be more lenient when it comes to antitrust enforcement.
The Trump administration, which ran from 2017 to 2021, notably kicked off investigations into tech giants that were then carried on by incumbent President Joe Biden’s government.
Under Biden, some major developments on the antitrust front include a civil lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) in January 2023 against Alphabet’s (GOOG)(GOOGL) Google for allegedly monopolizing digital advertising technologies, and another DOJ lawsuit filed in March this year against Apple (AAPL) for allegedly monopolizing smartphone markets.
Meanwhile, Facebook-parent Meta Platforms (META) has also been targeted by the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).
“The Biden administration has taken an aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement. Google, Meta (META), and (the National Association of Realtors) are some of the higher-profile names that have come under the scrutiny of the DOJ and FTC,” JPMorgan’s Michael Feroli said in a research note on Friday.
“A second Trump administration would likely take a more lenient approach to enforcement of the relevant statutes,” the analyst said.
“Even so, some conservatives are becoming more receptive to a vigorous competition policy, earning the name ‘Khan-servatives’ in reference to current FTC chair Lina Khan,” Feroli added.
The analyst also pointed out that the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “is amenable to antitrust enforcement actions against Big Tech.”
The project, known as the 2025 Presidential Transition Project, is an undertaking with a goal to build the policies and agendas of a conservative administration that would begin in January 2025 if Trump wins.
In the project’s policy agenda, the chapter on the FTC outlines several developments that “many, but not all, conservatives believe” may warrant the agency to make “a careful recalibration of certain aspects of antitrust and consumer protection law and enforcement.”
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