WASHINGTON • US House of Representatives' lawmakers have introduced sweeping antitrust legislation aimed at restraining the power of Big Tech and staving off corporate consolidation. If passed, the Bills would be the most ambitious update to monopoly laws in decades.
The Bills - five in total - take direct aim at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google and their grip on online commerce, information and entertainment. The proposals would make it easier to break up businesses that used their dominance in one area to get a stronghold in another, would create new hurdles for acquisitions of nascent rivals and would empower regulators with more funds to police companies.
The legislation could reshape the way the companies operate. Facebook and Google, for instance, could have a higher bar to prove that any mergers are not anti-competitive. Amazon could face more scrutiny when selling its own branded products. Apple could have a harder time entering new lines of business that are promoted on its App Store.
"Right now, unregulated tech monopolies have too much power over our economy. They are in a unique position to pick winners and losers, destroy small businesses, raise prices on consumers and put folks out of work," said Representative David Cicilline, chair of the antitrust subcommittee. "Our agenda will level the playing field and ensure the wealthiest, most powerful tech monopolies play by the same rules as the rest of us."
The introduction of the Bills, which have some bipartisan support, is the most aggressive challenge yet from Capitol Hill to Silicon Valley's tech giants, which have thrived for years without regulation or much restraint on the expansion of their business.
Last year, the antitrust subcommittee released a scathing report about the industry after a 16-month investigation, declaring that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google engaged in a variety of monopolistic behaviour. The proposals released on Friday try to address the concerns detailed in the report.
Over the past decade, dozens of Bills addressing data privacy, speech liability and children's online safety have failed. But efforts to curb the dominance of the biggest tech companies have gained broad support in recent years.
The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission during the Trump administration accused Google and Facebook of anticompetitive practices and filed lawsuits that are expected to be fought for years. Democrats and Republicans point to the dominance of a handful of firms as a root cause for the spread of disinformation, inequality in labour and wages, and haphazard rules for speech across the Internet.
The tech giants face similar challenges to their power across the globe, including antitrust investigations in Europe and new legislation in Australia and India to curb their power.
"These are just the type of new laws we need to really address the problem of gatekeeper power by dominant digital platforms," said Ms Charlotte Slaiman, the competition director for Public Knowledge, a public interest group. "These Bills would give antitrust enforcers a few more powerful tools to open up digital platform markets for competition."
The Bills set up a showdown with the tech industry's powerful influence armies. Over the past decade, the industry has assembled the largest group of lobbyists in Washington, and the companies sponsor think-tanks, fund academic papers and employ top antitrust litigation firms to defend their businesses.
Some of the proposals are likely to gain widespread support among lawmakers, including one focused on getting more funding for antitrust agencies through higher merger fees; the Senate recently passed a similar Bill.
NYTIMES
