Antitrust

Trump's New DOJ Nominee Wants To Ban Online Porn and Prosecute Big Tech

Adam Candeub has been nominated to head the Justice Department's Antitrust Division.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown | 7.22.2026 1:09 PM

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Just when I thought that Biden-era antitrust antagonism against tech companies was starting to fade, President Donald Trump has nominated Adam Candeub to lead antitrust enforcement at the Department of Justice (DOJ).

Currently serving as general counsel for the Federal Communications Commission, Candeub recently penned a report about how we need to criminalize pornography in order to protect marriage and promote human flourishing. Earlier generations, which he calls on us to emulate, took "measures to curb access to [sexual material] so that sexual desire could be channeled more easily into marriage," he wrote.

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Lest there's any doubt that Candeub doesn't simply want to target hardcore porn, he scoffs at 20th century judges who "imagined they had a moral duty to protect James Joyce's Ulysses."

That escalated quickly, no?

Candeub also appears to take an expansive view of antitrust enforcement, at least when it comes to Big Tech companies. In a chapter of the Heritage Foundation's infamous Project 2025, Candeub suggests taking social media's effect on our happiness into account when considering whether these platforms are violating antitrust laws.

Bringing Back Comstock

In "Restoring Obscenity Regulation in an Internet Age," put out by the Heritage Foundation, Candeub applauds the Supreme Court's 2025 decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton, which allowed for mandatory ID checks on websites with content that lawmakers deem "harmful to minors."

He also wants to take things further: "This decision opens the door both to a reconsideration of the current legal structure governing obscenity and, perhaps, to a return to the regulatory approach of the past," he wrote.

In the past, "speech restrictions that [furthered] public morality" were cool and "common law courts could sanction as libel 'any writings, pictures, or the like, of an immoral or illegal tendency," noted Candeub. In New York, the 1866 Obscene Literature Act "made it a crime for any person to sell or give away any 'obscene and indecent' book, pamphlet, drawing, painting, or photograph." Courts honored what was known as the Hicklin standard, under which determining whether material counted as criminal obscenity turned on whether it would "deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences" and "states brought legal actions against Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Arthur Schnitzler's Reigen, James Joyce's Ulysses—and even books like Cupid's Yoke, a polemical critique of marriage that recommended sex outside of conjugal bonds."

Are these the regulatory approaches of the past that Candeub wants to emulate? He doesn't explicitly endorse prosecuting people for literature. But he does go on to call our current approach to enforcing anti-obscenity laws "a social suicide pact."

Candeub might not want to start arresting sellers of Ulysses again today, but he does propose increasing online surveillance to enforce blocks on minors viewing sexual content ("age estimations can be made simply by analyzing publicly available online information such as your email address or even pictures of your hand movements"). And he advocates for using state and federal laws to prosecute porn websites and other online entities through which people might find porn.

"The most optimistic result under current law would be…obscenity actions for internet-distributed pornography in state courts; the existing federal laws, specifically the modern version of the Comstock Act, prohibit obscene material from interstate transmission," he wrote. "Motivated state and local prosecutors could still get convictions in conservative communities, and national prosecutors could go against the big platforms like Google, which do not enjoy immunity from federal laws, for distributing obscenity."

A Broader Agenda

Lest anyone think that Candeub's animosity toward internet........

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