A bipartisan pair of senators introduced legislation Friday aimed at stopping Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google from acquiring smaller rivals.
Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, the chairwoman of the Senate antitrust panel, and Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas introduced the Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, a bill premised on the view that tech acquisitions — for example, Facebook buying rival platforms such as Instagram and WhatsApp in the past decade — have hurt consumer choices and competition. The bill would make major companies demonstrate that their proposed mergers aren’t anticompetitive.
“Big Tech firms have bought up rivals to crush their competition, expand their monopolistic market share, and to harm working Americans. That’s bad for America,” Cotton said in a statement. “Under this bill, the largest tech monopolies will have the burden of proving that further acquisitions are lawful and good for the American people.”
The legislation is a companion bill to a similar bill in the House, written by Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, that has already passed the House Judiciary Committee and is expected to be voted on by the full chamber in the coming months.
Jeffries’s legislation would establish that certain acquisitions by Big Tech platforms with a market capitalization of over $600 billion, such as Facebook or Google, are in violation of antitrust laws.
The Senate bill would give the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission stronger authority to stop acquisitions by dominant platforms that could increase a platform’s monopoly power. The bill would also shift the burden of proof to the tech giants to establish that a merger is not anticompetitive and can gain governmental approval.
“This bipartisan legislation will put an end to those anticompetitive acquisitions by making it more difficult for dominant digital platforms to eliminate their competitors and enhance the platform’s market power,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “It’s past time to address our nation’s monopoly problem and modernize our antitrust laws for the digital economy.”
The House antitrust panel in June already passed six sweeping antitrust bills aimed at reining in tech giants such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook by narrow bipartisan margins after over 24 hours of debate and over a year of investigations into anticompetitive practices in the tech industry by the panel.
The legislative package, led by Democratic Rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island and Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado, represents the largest expansion of the federal government’s antitrust powers in generations and has received rare bipartisan support in the House Judiciary Committee — as well as some opposition to the bills from members of both parties.
“Over the past decade, Big Tech has acquired hundreds of companies. In many notable cases, these firms acquired actual or potential rivals to neutralize competitive threats or further expand their dominance,” Buck said in a statement.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
“By blocking mergers that primarily serve to kill competition and enhance monopoly power, this bill promotes small business growth, investment, innovation, and consumer choice online,” Buck said of the Senate legislation introduced Friday.
