Tech giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google have spent small fortunes asserting their influence in Washington D.C. Executives at these companies hold a small army of lobbyists at the hip, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice. They cozy up to lawmakers at expensive Silicon Valley fundraisers, and they regularly attend meetings on the Capitol and testify in the halls of Congress. But cash isn’t always king: A new set of antitrust reform bills introduced to Congress Friday by a bipartisan group of lawmakers could significantly rein in big tech’s power and alter their business practices.
The package of five bills would make it more difficult for large platforms to merge or acquire one another by increasing fees filed to antitrust agencies for merger reviews and by requiring “clear and convincing evidence” that there is no competition between merging companies. One bill, arguably the most controversial, would allow prosecutors to sue large tech companies and force them to sell parts of their business that represent a clear conflict of interest.
Another bill would require online platforms to make it easy for users to transfer their data to other services. The final piece of legislation would ban online platforms from “self-preferencing” or promoting their own products ahead of others— Google putting its Google Maps results first in a search result, or Amazon promoting its own line of T-shirts ahead of another company’s.
The bills target companies with at least 500,000 U.S. users, $600 billion in revenue, and that are deemed “critical trading partners” for other companies. Democratic lawmakers hope that by clearly targeting tech giants instead of pushing for more generalized antitrust reform, which Senate Democrats have backed, they will be able to get widespread Republican support.
The legislation follows a House Judiciary Committee report last fall which found clear evidence that Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook were monopolizing the digital economy. This set of legislation will be a test to see if Congress can effectively act on their bipartisan findings. The bills will now go to the Judiciary Committee, and if they vote favorably, to the House floor.
Tech-funded groups, meanwhile, are already pushing back on the bills. “Adopting the European regulatory model would make it harder for American tech companies to innovate and compete both here and globally,” Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law & Economics, said in a statement.
Adam Kovacevich, CEO of Chamber of Progress, an advocacy group backed by Amazon, Facebook and Google, wrote a lengthy Medium post arguing that the bills would make life more difficult for consumers.
“Democrats should focus on making people’s lives better, not messing with stuff people already like,” he wrote.
But some tech companies applauded the new set of bills. The American Choice and Innovation Online Act is “an important step in addressing anti-competitive conduct in the App Store ecosystem,” said Spotify Chief Legal Officer Horacio Gutierrez, “and a clear sign that momentum has shifted as the world is waking up to the need to demand fair competition in the App economy.”
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