Washington:
A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the US House of Representatives introduced 4 bills on Friday aimed at reining in the energy of the tech giants, with one potentially major to their break-up.
Two of the bills address the situation of giant corporations, such as Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc’s Google, developing a platform for other enterprises and then competing against these identical enterprises.
One measure bans platforms from owning subsidiaries that operate on their platform if these subsidiaries compete with other enterprises – potentially forcing the Big Tech firms to sell assets.
“From Amazon and Facebook to Google and Apple, it is clear that these unregulated tech giants have become too big to care,” stated US Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington state Democrat and sponsor of this measure.
The pro-company US Chamber of Commerce stated it “strongly opposes” the bills’ method. “Bills that target specific companies, instead of focusing on business practices, are simply bad policy … and could be ruled unconstitutional,” the Chamber’s Neil Bradley stated in a statement.
In contrast, Robert Weissman, president of advocacy group Public Citizen, stated “Big Tech’s unchecked growth and dominance have led to incredible abuses of power that have hurt consumers, workers, small businesses and innovation. That unchecked power ends now.”
Representative David Cicilline, the Democratic chair of the antitrust panel, is an original co-sponsor of the bills, as is the best Republican, Ken Buck. The chair of the Judiciary Committee, Jerrold Nadler, also sponsored the bills.
A second measure would make it illegal in most situations for a platform to give preference to its personal goods on its platform with a hefty fine of 30% of the US income of the impacted company if they violate the measure.
The third bill would call for a platform to refrain from any merger unless it can show the acquired business does not compete with any solution or service the platform is in.
A fourth would call for platforms to let customers to transfer their information elsewhere if they need, such as to a competing company.
In addition to these 4, a fifth bill would raise what the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission charge to assess the greatest corporations to assure their mergers are legal and boost the budgets of the agencies. A companion to this has currently passed the Senate.
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