Christine A. Varney, nominated by President Barack Obama to be the U.S.’s next antitrust chief, has described Google Inc. as a monopolist that will dominate online computing services the way Microsoft Corp. ruled software.

“For me, Microsoft is so last century. They are not the problem,” Varney said at a June 19 panel discussion sponsored by the American Antitrust Institute. The U.S. economy will “continually see a problem — potentially with Google” because it already “has acquired a monopoly in Internet online advertising,” she said.

While the remarks were made months before Obama picked her to head the Justice Department’s antitrust division, the comments signal her approach to the job if confirmed by the Senate. The Microsoft case, brought in 1998 by the Clinton administration, could have led to the breakup of the software giant and was a landmark in antitrust law.

In her remarks at the American Antitrust Institute, Varney advocated aggressive enforcement of antitrust laws to curb the conduct of individual companies that dominate an industry. She didn’t return a reporter’s telephone call seeking comment today.

via bloomberg.com

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