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 of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992) first introduced in October 2021 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 by Chamber of Progress head Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public-policy rep who founded that center-left advocacy group (with tech-industry funding) 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, 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, would cover Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft but leave out Walmart and other large retailers. The companies that fall under the act’s scope would be banned from a variety of actions if those would “materially harm competition.” Among those barred:favoring their own “products, services, or lines of business”; limiting another company’s ability to compete with those offerings on the same platform; enforcing of terms of service in ways that vary unfairly among “among similarly situated business users”; keeping other firms from interoperating with their systems and services;making other firms pay for non-essential products or services from the platform to get access to it; employing private data gleaned from their operation of the platform to boost their own products and services on it. Those and other provisions would blow up most of the app-store rules that Apple and Google have created to help themselves to a non-trivial fraction of transactions of digital goods and services on those platforms. They would also upend Google’s habit of featuring results from its own services in search and Amazon doing the same with house-brand product lines. Critics have also said the clause covering terms-of-service enforcement would threaten content moderation by social platforms.The act would allow civil enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and individual states, with possible fines of up to 10% of total US revenue–down from 15% in an earlier draft. The odds of this bill going anywhere in Congress with only months before the fall campaign season kicks off, however, remain unspecified.
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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 of the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S.2992) first introduced in October 2021 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 by Chamber of Progress head Adam Kovacevich, a former Google public-policy rep who founded that center-left advocacy group (with tech-industry funding) 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, 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, would cover Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft but leave out Walmart and other large retailers. The companies that fall under the act’s scope would be banned from a variety of actions if those would “materially harm competition.” Among those barred:favoring their own “products, services, or lines of business”; limiting another company’s ability to compete with those offerings on the same platform; enforcing of terms of service in ways that vary unfairly among “among similarly situated business users”; keeping other firms from interoperating with their systems and services;making other firms pay for non-essential products or services from the platform to get access to it; employing private data gleaned from their operation of the platform to boost their own products and services on it. Those and other provisions would blow up most of the app-store rules that Apple and Google have created to help themselves to a non-trivial fraction of transactions of digital goods and services on those platforms. They would also upend Google’s habit of featuring results from its own services in search and Amazon doing the same with house-brand product lines. Critics have also said the clause covering terms-of-service enforcement would threaten content moderation by social platforms.The act would allow civil enforcement by the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice and individual states, with possible fines of up to 10% of total US revenue–down from 15% in an earlier draft. The odds of this bill going anywhere in Congress with only months before the fall campaign season kicks off, however, remain unspecified.