President Donald Trump has nominated Adam Candeub to lead antitrust enforcement at the Justice Department. The pick hands the government’s cases against Big Tech to a lawyer who wants to weaken the law protecting online speech and to put internet users under surveillance to enforce age checks.
Candeub, general counsel at the Federal Communications Commission, was named on Tuesday as assistant attorney general. A White House official confirmed on social media that he would run the antitrust division. The job hands him the department’s case against Google, which is appealing a ruling that it ran an illegal search monopoly, along with the 2024 suit accusing Apple of monopolizing the smartphone market.
Candeub has spent years pressing to weaken Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the provision that shields platforms from lawsuits over what their users post. Weaken that shield, and companies gain every reason to delete more user content rather than carry the risk. A 2019 essay of his described Facebook, Google and Twitter, now X, as using the statute to “advocate for an open internet while at the same time justifying their censorship regime.”
He helped build the first Trump administration’s attempt to scrap the provision. As a Commerce Department official, he worked to carry out the president’s executive order targeting Big Tech over claims it silenced conservative voices.
The surveillance runs through his campaign against online pornography. Candeub set out the case in a Heritage Foundation report on July 6 and an op-ed the day after. He argued for prosecuting porn under the modern version of the Comstock Act and state obscenity laws. “Never has so much pornography been so available to so many at so little cost,” he wrote.
To keep the material from minors, he proposed estimating ages by watching what people do online. Age can be judged, he wrote, “simply by analyzing publicly available online information such as your email address or even pictures of your hand movements.” That would put every adult reaching for a legal website under a system that reads their email address and studies images of their hands to guess how old they are.
His plans for antitrust follow the same instinct. Candeub has granted that tech platforms show little of the consumer harm competition law was built to catch. He argues regulators should reach for behavioral claims instead, among them that “social media makes Americans less happy.”
He laid out the harder line in a chapter he wrote for the Heritage Foundation’s proposed blueprint for Trump’s second term. “The large internet platforms have transformed the US economy, streamlining consumer purchases, networking billions of people, and altering long-established business practices,” it reads. “Despite their enormous size, they have avoided significant antitrust liability or prosecution. The reasons for this are not entirely clear.”
Candeub has questioned whether the Federal Trade Commission, which shares antitrust enforcement with the Justice Department, should be allowed to police competition “or even continue to exist.” In his Project 2025 chapter he urged revisiting the Supreme Court precedent that protected the agency’s independence “perhaps sooner than later.” The court did that in June, ruling against former FTC commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. Trump had fired her without cause.
Brendan Carr, who chairs the FCC, welcomed the nomination and said Candeub brought “a thoughtful and sensible approach” to his work as the regulator’s general counsel.
Confirmation could take months and has proved hard to win for many of Trump’s nominees in the narrowly Republican Senate. The antitrust division has run under acting head Omeed Assefi, and lately associate attorney general Stanley Woodward, since Gail Slater was forced out as its chief.
