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Congress looks to break up Big Tech with bold new antitrust bills - New York Post
Jun 11, 2021 1 min, 57 secs

Congressional lawmakers are targeting tech giants over antitrust concerns — and the proposed legislation could force them to overhaul or even break up their increasingly dominant business empires.

The package of five antitrust bills introduced by a bipartisan group in Congress on Friday — aimed at Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s parent Alphabet — would make it harder for the biggest tech platforms to complete mergers and keep them from owning businesses that create conflicts of interest.

Two of the new bills could be particularly tricky for Amazon and Apple to navigate as they both run marketplaces that include their own products or apps that compete with outside sellers that rely on their services.

Cicilline would reduce the ability of big tech companies to use their platforms to promote their own goods ahead of those of competitors — a rule that could slam Apple and Google’s Android software over their app-store policies, and Amazon over its massive third-party marketplace. .

The Judiciary Committee will need to vote on the bills before they make their way to the House for approval and then the Senate.

The tech giants did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday, but reports that the bills were coming had already spurred pushback

“Adopting the European regulatory model would make it harder for American tech companies to innovate and compete both here and globally,” Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law & Economics told CNBC, which added that the group has received funding from Google in the past. 

In a Medium post published earlier this week, Adam Kovacevich, chief executive of Chamber of Progress, an advocacy group backed by the five tech giants, argued that consumers would miss out on “conveniences” such as Amazon Prime free shipping and cross posting between Facebook and Instagram, under those proposals

The antitrust reforms follow a 16-month long investigation by the House Judiciary subcommittee on anticompetitive issues into the four tech giants that was completed last year

At the time, the investigation’s 450-page report found that Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google hold monopoly power and that antitrust laws should be revised to better deal with today’s digital media landscape

The report said that major changes for big tech companies may have to spin off or separate parts of their businesses or make them harder to buy smaller companies

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