Tech Regulation Hits The Backburner As Dems Take Big Donations

Lobbyists for Amazon, Apple, and other Big Tech companies are bundling six-figure donations for the DCCC and DSCC as Democratic leaders delay antitrust votes.

By David Moore, Sludge

This week, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) took to the Senate floor to call for a vote on a long-simmering bipartisan bill that would reshape tech platform antitrust policy—with dwindling time in the legislative calendar before the midterm elections.

“It’s time to stop throwing popcorn at the C.E.O.s and actually do something,” Klobuchar said in her remarks. “Now it is time to bring this bill to a vote on the floor.”

Referring to the tech giants, Klobuchar said, “At some point they have gotten so big that you have to put some rules of the road in place to ensure that we can have the next Google or competitor to Google, or we can have a true competitor to Amazon… this isn’t going to happen if you let four big platforms control the day.”

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (S. 2992), sponsored by Klobuchar with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), seeks to curb the market power of tech platforms like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google by making it illegal for them to privilege their own products on their platforms or unfairly limit availability of their competitors’ products.

In January, the bill passed out of the Senate Committee on the Judiciary by a bipartisan vote of 16 to six, but since then it has been stalled by Senate Democratic leadership, which has refused to call it up for a vote.