Senators Update Antitrust Bill to Focus More Narrowly on Big Tech Firms
An antitrust bill intended to stop the largest firms from leveraging their market power to help their own businesses and harm customers got a maintenance update this week that aims it more precisely at certain tech companies.
The revised text(Opens in a new window) of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992(Opens in a new window)) first introduced in October 2021(Opens in a new window) by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), still bans “certain discriminatory conduct by covered platforms” but adds carve-outs for internet providers and financial institutions.
As highlighted in a Twitter thread(Opens in a new window) by Chamber of Progress(Opens in a new window) head Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public-policy rep who founded that center-left advocacy group (with tech-industry funding(Opens in a new window)) in 2021, the new text exempts online platforms that “transmit data to and receive data from all or substantially all internet endpoints.” And it no longer includes “payments” as a category of covered services by online platforms.
(We asked Klobuchar’s press office about those changes and will update this post with their input when we get it.)
As in its previous text(Opens in a new window), this bill applies to online platforms with at least 50 million monthly average users in the US that are run by a corporation with net annual sales or a market capitalization more than $550 billion, and that operate as “a critical trading partner” for other companies doing business there. That second requirement, per Fortune’s list of the largest publicly traded companies(Opens in a new window), would cover Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft but leave out Walmart and other large
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