Members of the US Congress have proposed a package of legislation aimed at reining in the power of 'big tech'. If approved by the full Congress, the laws could require companies like Amazon and Facebook to break up their businesses, separating platforms they provide to others from their own services.
Introduced by the Democrat-controlled House Antitrust Subcommittee, the five laws also count the backing of a handful of Republicans, the Wall Street Journal reports. Gathering support from Republicans will be crucial for getting the legislation passed in the Senate, which is divided evenly between the two main parties.
The committee has previously investigated the tech sector and held hearings on the matter. This culminated in a report released in October 2020 that found tech giants Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google were exploiting their significant market power in anticompetitive ways. The recommendations from that report provide much of the background for the proposed legislation. The five bills are:
- The “American Innovation and Choice Online Act” to prohibit discriminatory conduct by dominant platforms, including a ban on self-preferencing.
- The “Platform Competition and Opportunity Act” prohibits acquisitions of competitive threats by dominant platforms, as well acquisitions that expand or entrench the market power of online platforms.
- The “Ending Platform Monopolies Act” would require platform businesses to separate from their services side and end any conflict of interest. This would eliminate the ability of dominant platforms to leverage their control across multiple business lines to self-preference and disadvantage competitors in ways that undermine free and fair competition, the committee said.
- The “Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act” promotes competition online by lowering barriers to entry and switching costs for businesses and consumers through interoperability and data portability requirements.
- The “Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act” updates filing fees for mergers for the first time in two decades. The proposed higher fees for merger notifications would go to boosting enforcement resources at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission, which oversee competition law.
The companies targeted by the bills must have a market capitalization of USD 600 billion or more, as well as more than 50 million active monthly users or 100,000 monthly active business users. In addition, they must be a “critical trading partner” that has the ability to restrict or impede another business’ access to customers or services. Only Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google currently meet the parameters, a person familiar with the matter told the WSJ.
The individual companies did not comment on the proposed laws. Their main lobbying group the CCIA said in a statement that the Congress members were singling out "a few companies whose competing products and services are very popular with consumers", rather than pursuing a broader reform of competition law and continuing the market-oriented approach favoured in the US in the past. "Writing regulations for a handful of businesses will skew competition and leave consumers worse off,” the group said in a statement.
