Today, U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the Bust Up Big Tech Act, new legislation to restore accountability and competition to Big Tech. Senator Hawley’s bill would break up Big Tech companies seeking to dominate multiple industries simultaneously, by banning companies like Amazon from marketing their own retail goods alongside those of other sellers or providing online hosting or cloud services to an ever-growing swath of the internet—including competitors. The law would also empower the FTC to monitor compliance and strengthen antitrust enforcement.
“Woke Big Tech companies like Google and Amazon have been coddled by Washington politicians for years. This treatment has allowed them to amass colossal amounts of power that they use to censor political opinions they don’t agree with and shut out competitors who offer consumers an alternative to the status quo. It’s past time to bust up Big Tech companies, restore competition, and give the power back to the American consumers.”
Senator Josh Hawley
Last week, Senator Hawley introduced the Trust Busting for the Twenty-First Century Act, which will crack down on mergers and acquisitions by mega-corporations and strengthen antitrust enforcement to pursue the breakup of dominant, anticompetitive firms.
The Bust Up Big Tech Act will:
- Ban major companies in the business of offering search engines, marketplaces, and exchanges from competing with third-party vendors by selling, advertising, or promoting their own competing goods and services on their sites
- Example: Amazon should not be able to own Amazon Marketplace and sell their own Amazon products on their marketplace against other competitors.
- Ban major companies in the business of offering search engines, marketplaces, and exchanges from expanding their power and creating anticompetitive conflicts of interest by providing the online hosting and internet infrastructure services for third parties
- Example: Amazon cannot continue to operate an overwhelmingly dominant retail business and simultaneously own an enormous share of the cloud computing technology upon which the internet itself is built.
- Empower the Federal Trade Commission to hire sufficient staff to monitor compliance
- Ensure the antitrust laws are actually enforced, by authorizing state attorneys general and private citizens to bring civil actions to ensure compliance