tonysopranobignaturals-deactiva:
US lawmakers are eyeing votes before November’s midterm elections on legislation that marks the first major effort by Congress to regulate big tech since the inception of the internet.
The American Innovation and Choice Act, which has bipartisan support in the House and Senate, would lay down key ground rules for dominant firms including Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Apple Inc., Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
The measure is the product of years of effort, including a 16-month House probe featuring public testimony from the chief executive officers of Apple, Amazon, Google and Meta. The investigation by the panel, which published its final report last week, found the four companies use their platforms to dominate vast swaths of the internet—from social networking to mobile apps to e-commerce—often at the expense of smaller rivals.
The bill seeks to break the stranglehold the largest tech platforms have over their markets by prohibiting them from giving advantages to their own products and making it easier for rivals to communicate with customers and collect information about their users.
Tech companies are funding commercials against this. If you see something with a whole lot of fear mongering about prices and no more 2-day shipping from Amazon and finishing with “tell Senators Such-and-Such to vote no on S.2992!”…that’s this bill.
^Also claims that antitrust “threatens national security”
