Attorney General of Antitrust Division Makan Delrahim. Photo / Getty Images
Attorney General of Antitrust Division Makan Delrahim. Photo / Getty Images
When Google bought DoubleClick in 2007, the search engine group needed a skilled antitrust lobbyist to help it win approval in Washington for a move that would help it build a powerful position in digital advertising.
So it enlisted Makan Delrahim, who had served in the Department of Justice underPresident George W Bush and on Capitol Hill. The relationship proved fruitful for both sides. Google's deal was cleared, and it paid Delrahim's firm US$100,000 ($150,695) for lobbying that year.
Now Delrahim is on the other side of the table — he heads the DoJ antitrust division which this week announced a sweeping review of possible competition issues at "market-leading online platforms". The high-stakes review comes at a time when Silicon Valley is firmly in the crosshairs of both parties ahead of the 2020 election.
The 49-year-old will be a critical decision maker as President Donald Trump's administration considers whether to rein in Big Tech, even as his record suggests he is an unlikely scourge of the sector.
"Makan, more than other enforcers, believes that innovators should be entitled to the fruits of their innovation because without that, the incentive to innovate just isn't there," says Jonathan Jacobson, who worked with Delrahim on an antitrust modernisation commission in the 2000s.
Born in Tehran to an Iranian-Jewish family, Delrahim fled the country as a 10-year-old as the Shah was toppled by Islamic revolutionaries. He arrived in Los Angeles in 1979 knowing no English and spent much of his spare time working at the family business, a petrol station. "I pumped gas, changed oil, tuned up cars, and sold tires," he said in two March speeches. "Those experiences taught me a lot more than just how to work on a car. My father . . . embodied the American entrepreneurial spirit."
He has dabbled in business-building himself, in between his government stints. He launched a dispute resolution start-up in 2013 and produced a 2016 black comedy film called Trash Fire. A poker player, he also served as a director of the World Poker Tour Foundation.
Delrahim earned a bachelors degree in kinesiology from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1991 and spent a year working as a fitness trainer and a restaurant chef before heading to Washington for law school.
While still in school, Delrahim gained technology experience by working as a licensing analyst at the National Institutes of Health and doing a stint at the US Trade Representative's office working on intellectual property rights issues.
After trying private practice, he worked for Orrin Hatch, the now retired Utah senator, on the judiciary committee, where he shepherded through conservative nominees and became chief counsel. He moved to DoJ in 2003.
Delrahim will be a critical decision maker as President Donald Trump's administration considers whether to rein in Big Tech. Photo / Getty Images
Outgoing and politically savvy, the father of three has contacts all over Washington and knows how to use them. "He's an extremely affable guy," says Deborah Garza, who also worked on the modernisation commission, adding that friends note "you cannot walk down Pennsylvania Avenue with Makan, without having 100 people saying hello to him. He knows everybody."
No wonder big technology firms sought him out after he joined Brownstein Hyatt Farber and Schreck in 2005. Google and Apple were early clients, while Qualcomm paid for his expertise for much of a decade.
In March 2016, as many Republicans were lining up to oppose Donald Trump, Delrahim took the opposite tack, arguing in the New York Post that backing Trump was essential to keeping the Supreme Court under conservative control. He was rewarded with a stint in the White House, working on judicial nominations.
In late 2017, Delrahim returned to the DoJ to head the antitrust division and plunged into a bruising legal battle over AT&T's US$80 billion purchase of Time Warner.
Trump had pledged on the campaign trail that he would stop the merger and regularly inveighed against CNN, Time Warner's cable news division.
Two months after Delrahim's arrival, the DoJ sued to block the deal. It argued that consumers would lose choices if media distribution channels were allowed to purchase content providers. Critics were not convinced and neither were the courts which ruled for the companies. Delrahim said later the companies had deliberately sought "to create a public perception of political motivation, which was pure bullshit".
Since then, Delrahim has approved a string of mega deals, including T-Mobile's takeover of Sprint. Lawyers say he is as concerned with over-enforcement as with under-enforcement.
"The whole purpose of antitrust law is to unleash competition and to unleash innovation," Garza says. "I think he's very sensitive about doing things in antitrust enforcement that could be counterproductive."
The tech companies he is investigating may take comfort from his remarks at a 2018 conference: "You want businesses to want to innovate and have the ability to become monopolies," he said. "Being big should never be bad under antitrust law or policy. Being big behaving badly should be bad."
But his more recent rhetoric has been tougher. Last month he noted that Standard Oil — the first big US antitrust target — had once been a technology pioneer but its "innovation slowed as it became an entrenched monopolist."
"Where competition is harmed, consumers and markets lose," he said.
