Thursday’s vote by the House Judiciary Committee required Big Tech platforms to list lines of business that they own on their platforms if they are also competing against them. This was the culmination of two days of votes which saw four measures approved to limit the power of some of the most successful companies.
The committee approved the bill by a vote 21-20.
Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), chair of the antitrust subcommittee, said the bill forcing Big Tech to choose between running a platform and competing on it was needed because the tech giants had not played fairly. “Google, Amazon and Apple each favor their own products in search results, giving themselves an unfair advantage over competitors,” he said.
The committee also approved Wednesday and Thursday bills that would prohibit platforms like Amazon’s from disadvantaging competitors who use their platform. It also required Big Tech companies considering mergers, to prove that such deals are legal and not require antitrust enforcers. It also approved a bill that would require platforms to permit users to transfer their data to other places.
Asked about the package of bills, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said there was concern in both parties about the tech giants. “This legislation attempts to address that in the interest of fairness, in the interest of competition, and the interest of meeting the needs of people whose privacy, whose data and all the rest is at the mercy of these tech companies,” she said.
There has been opposition to the anti-tech measures from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Alphabet Inc’s Google, and there is no certainty that any of them will become law.
Lawmakers from both parties have expressed concern about the toughest legislation in the package.
The committee also voted to increase the budgets of the agencies enforcing antitrust law. A companion measure has passed the Senate. And the panel passed a bill to ensure that antitrust cases brought by state attorneys general remain in the court they select.
