NEW YORK -- U.S. President Joe Biden's agenda to rein in Big Tech took another step forward Wednesday with the nomination hearing for his pick to lead the antitrust division of the Justice Department.

"The American Dream is real, without a doubt, but we can't take it for granted," antitrust lawyer Jonathan Kanter told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Liberty depends on opportunity, and opportunity depends on free, fair, competitive markets."

The Big Tech critic was nominated in July for the assistant attorney general post.

As an attorney, Kanter started out at the Federal Trade Commission, where he investigated and challenged anti-competitive mergers, before moving to the private sector and taking on cases against Google for such companies as Microsoft, News Corp. and Spotify.

In leading its antitrust division, Kanter would also inherit the Justice Department's ongoing litigation against Google parent Alphabet related to monopoly charges over its search engine, as well as the division's ongoing investigation into Apple's App Store business.

During the nomination hearing, Kanter hinted that he will go after Big Tech. "I've been a strong proponent of vigorous antitrust enforcement in the technology area, among others," he said.

Kanter would round out the progressive trifecta of "Wu & Khan & Kanter," mimicking a law firm with the names of two other prominent Biden administration proponents of regulating Big Tech: Tim Wu and Lina Khan.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice has an ongoing antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet and an investigation open into Apple's App Store.    © Reuters

Wu joined Biden's National Economic Council in March as special assistant to the president for technology and competition policy. The Columbia Law School professor had earned a reputation among progressives for his New York Times opinion pieces criticizing Big Tech and for his 2018 book "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age."

"We live in a time when the president and we in the White House feel a very acute, popular demand that more be done to control corporate power and profit-taking," Wu said last week at an antitrust legal conference in New York.

Biden tapped Khan to head the FTC soon after, and she was confirmed by the Senate in June. At 32, she is the youngest-ever FTC chair, and she first made waves in the legal world while still at Yale Law School with a now-famous law journal article arguing that the dominant price-centric thinking in antitrust no longer works in the era of Amazon.com.

Khan stood next to Biden in July when he signed an executive order directing federal agencies to take a closer look at the tech sector.

Facebook and Amazon have called for Khan to recuse herself from any agency investigations, lawsuits or other disputes with either company, but she has refused. Apple and Google may request the same for Kanter.

U.S. President Joe Biden hands a pen to Lina Khan, chair of the Federal Trade Commission, as he signs an executive order on "promoting competition in the American economy" as members of his cabinet stand by at the White House on July 9.   © Reuters

Kanter's confirmation could take some time but is ultimately expected to succeed. Biden's antitrust agenda is one political item with rare bipartisan support. Khan's confirmation included 21 votes from Republican senators, and former assistant attorneys general from both sides of the aisle have written a letter urging the Senate to confirm Kanter.

"We are at a critical moment in antitrust," Sen. Amy Klobuchar said at Wednesday's hearing. "There is growing bipartisan consensus that our country has a major monopoly power problem, and I really, really appreciate the work of our colleagues on both sides of the aisle on this issue," she said. Klobuchar, a Democrat, chairs the Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights.

Republican Sen. Charles Grassley also signaled support for reining in Big Tech.

"Mr. Kanter has been a forceful critic of big tech companies. So have I," he said. "The market size and power of companies like Facebook and Google enable them to exert substantial control over how Americans get and share information."

Monday saw calls for antitrust legislation against Facebook take an unexpected turn when the company -- with its stock price already reeling from damning allegations by a whistleblower the night before on the CBS news show "60 Minutes" -- suffered an hourslong worldwide outage affecting all its services, including Instagram and WhatsApp.

The loss of service at WhatsApp, with its more than 2 billion users across the globe, in particular stoked concerns.

"If Facebook's monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should've been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram)," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted Monday , "the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up."