Antitrust: New bills would limit Big Tech’s power
Democrats in the House last week launched their “biggest broadside yet” against Big Tech, said Dana Mattioli and Ryan Tracy in The Wall Street Journal. A package of five separate bills takes direct aim at “the most richly valued” companies in America, seeking to limit how tech companies can use their overlapping lines of business to enhance their power. The most far-reaching, the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, could force Amazon to “split its business into two separate websites”—one for its own products and one for other sellers—or even to “shut down the sale of its own products.” It could make Google split up its search engine and its YouTube video business. The package is very carefully tailored to strike at a small group of technology companies; almost all of its provisions apply only to companies with a market value of at least $600 billion, effectively exempting Walmart, which runs a marketplace similar to Amazon’s. While several House Republicans have signed on to the legislation, gaining “sufficient Republican support” to get it through the Senate “will be an uphill battle.”
Though GOP representatives supported the House’s antitrust investigation last year, trying to turn the panel’s conclusions into law has “opened a rift among Republicans,” said Leah Nylen in Politico.com. Many are reluctant to support legislation that does not “include their concerns about anti-conservative bias” and “the repeal of a liability shield for online companies.” One conservative advocacy group called the package of bills “Washington meddling at its worst.” The tech industry itself has also quickly “come out swinging” against the legislation, said Shirin Ghaffary and Sara Morrison in Vox.com. Its lobbyists argue that stricter regulation “could jeopardize the economic strength of the American tech sector and inadvertently help competitors in China, as well as limit the ability of tech companies to offer free products to consumers.”
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised “thorny speechrelated issues” about the tech giants, and “nothing in the bills” would address them, said Jon Healey in the Los Angeles Times. They provide no privacy protections, and do nothing “to stop the spread of misinformation and hate speech.” Despite these lapses, though, the House bills “tee up a debate worth having.” Most attention has been focused on the parts of the legislation that could break up Google and Amazon, but there are other parts that could be even more important. One bill would stop “Big Tech companies from buying up potential competitors,” preventing a repeat of Facebook’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp. But maybe the most critical is a bill that would require giant tech companies to let users “transfer their data to competing platforms,” letting loose the flood of innovation that the dominance of a few giant companies has held back.