Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar released a sweeping antitrust reform bill on Thursday that would present Big Tech companies such as Facebook and Google with a significant risk of being broken up and prevent dominant firms from acquiring smaller ones.
The bill would rewrite competition laws to impose larger penalties on antitrust violations, set higher standards for approving mergers, and give antitrust enforcers such as the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice greater tools and funding to hold companies accountable for illegal activity.
The legislation has much in common with past bills proposed by House Democrats and some populist Republicans who have been critical of Big Tech, such as Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, the new ranking member of the House antitrust subpanel. This suggests there is likely to be bipartisan support for the bill.
“While the United States once had some of the most effective antitrust laws in the world, our economy today faces a massive competition problem,” Klobuchar said in a statement Thursday.
“We can no longer sweep this issue under the rug and hope our existing laws are adequate,” she said.
The antitrust measure is the first piece of legislation released by Klobuchar, who is the new chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary antitrust panel. Klobuchar is a staunch critic of Big Tech and has called for aggressive action against some of the tech giants’ alleged anti-competitive behavior, such as Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, and Google’s exploitation of customer data to bolster its lead in the search engine market.
The legislation, the Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act, would allow antitrust enforcers such as the FTC and the DOJ to obtain civil penalties for violations of monopoly law and would make it easier for them to consider breaking up a company in response to certain violations.
Additionally, companies that have already gone through a merger, like Facebook, would be required to update the antitrust enforcement agencies on the outcomes of their deals and would allow for mergers that were approved in the past six years to be examined by the government.
Democratic Sens. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Ed Markey of Massachusetts are co-sponsoring the bill.
During an interview with CNBC on Thursday, Klobuchar said the antitrust enforcement outlined in her bill is not intended to punish successful companies unfairly.
“When we talk about structural remedies and breaking things up, those companies would then be unleashed to do even more,” she said.
However, some conservatives expressed opposition to the bill, saying that it could stifle the country’s leading tech firms by slowing down innovation and stopping productive mergers.
“Companies that have succeeded by making consumers better off would be treated as guilty until proven innocent,” said Neil Chilson, acting chief technologist at the Federal Trade Commission for a year during the Trump administration.
“It could turn antitrust into a tool for politically favored businesses to squeeze their competition,” said Chilson, who is now a senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute, a libertarian research organization.
Chilson added that although antitrust enforcement is important for holding businesses accountable for monopolistic behavior that harms consumers, Klobuchar’s bill would “itself distort markets and harm consumers.”
