U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and lawmakers from both parties said on Wednesday they had the Senate votes needed to pass legislation aimed at reining in Meta’s Facebook, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, and Amazon.com from favoring their own businesses in search results and other ways. Klobuchar and U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley urged a vote be taken.
“We wouldn’t be asking for a vote if we didn’t think we could get 60 votes,” said Klobuchar, who was flanked by Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican who backs the bill, and House sponsors Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat, and Ken Buck, a Republican.
In the Senate, bills generally need support from 60 senators to cut off debate and move to a vote on final passage.
The Senate is expected to vote on the bill this summer, perhaps as early as late June, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The House is then expected to vote on the Senate version, sources said.
“This bill has to pass in June,” said Buck. Grassley said: “We need a Senate vote. And we need that Senate vote to be soon.”
The tech giants have said the bill would imperil popular consumer products like Google Maps and Amazon Basics and make it harder for the companies to protect their users’ security and privacy.
MacDailyNews Take: Why does the legislation require a market value of at least $550 billion to qualify for regulation, thereby excluding the likes of Walmart, Target, Samsung, etc.? Are any of these U.S. Senators invested in any of the companies that are spared from regulation and thus likely to benefit from this legislation becoming law?
The Senate proposal, like its House companion, requires nondiscrimination between products, services, or lines of businesses offered by only a handful of online services that would have the unintended consequences of disrupting Americans’ use of integrated tech services they like, and weakening U.S. competitiveness.
It is concerning that the country with the strongest tech industry and producers of some of the most popular digital products appears to be gravitating towards government-mandated industrial policies used in other countries with less robust innovation. The type of government industrial intervention proposed is what we’d expect to see from China, Russia, and other countries. These policies would actually hold back U.S. companies as they compete with China and other countries.
These proposals need to be thoroughly examined so Congress can understand the innovation, competition and national security implications. — Computer & Communications Industry Association (of which Amazon, Apple, and Google are members) Vice President Arthur Sidney, October 19, 2021
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I suppose that will make it more likely Apple will launch their own search engine.
Apple has nothing to lose in this regard, and Google has one less way to retaliate.
I think it might actually make it less likely since Apple keeps all user data to itself and would be highly scrutinized when suspected of favoring itself when running a Search service. Otherwise the bill is no skin off their nose as Apple relies on third party Search services at present.
It’s great to see Congress is voting on legislation that will bring relief to Americans during this inflationary period. /s
You complain when big bad government helps others and you complain when the government doesn’t bend over to help you. Make up your mind.
If supersized disgruntled Americans worked together instead of whining, then your consumerist lifestyle wouldn’t be soooooooo painful. Whaaaaaaaaaaaa.
On the good side, legislation will bring relief to freedom of information and not taint elections with censoring half of the political discussion. That would be conservatives.
But I agree with you it’s a DISGRACE Pelosi’s vengeful HATE for Trump is beating a dead horse, AGAIN and AGAIN, with a prime time ABC biased slanted TV SHOW tonight.
Also wasting time on restrictions of the Second Amendment passing yet another gun law added to over 200,000 that exist, and pay attention woke leftists — NO CRIMINAL WILL OBEY — and not solve the problem.
Democrat control of Washington should be working night and day to lower inflation, drill for energy, lower gas and food prices, guard our borders, keep our streets safe, but NO. They are totally clueless how to get it done with the nation’s WORST president, so turn ALL attention to guns and evil Trump, to DEFLECT from your pitiful performance. Period!…
The $550bn threshold is good, as government intervention in tech ‘monopolies’ (loose definition) tends to entrench the incumbents further and raise the bar to entry to new disruptive players. See Stratechery (where I learnt this stuff).
A market cap of $550 billion is arbitrary and in five years will be meaningless as in a few years companies below that threshold will cross it (unless we have a huge correction in the market). It could easily have been based at $100 billion or even $10 billion. Why have it based upon a market cap at all? Are these Senators saying self dealing by large (but not huge) market cap companies is OK?
And how are they going to really enforce it except in clearly egregious cases? Are they going to set up a new bureaucracy that will go into these huge companies and review all their source code for these things?