Proposed Antitrust Legislation Not the Way to Regulate Big Tech, Panelists Say

WASHINGTON, June 29, 2022 – Critics at a Foreign Policy magazine event blasted the efforts of the Federal Trade Commission and lawmakers to crack down on Big Tech, saying legislative efforts could impact America’s global competitiveness in the tech industry.

On Thursday, panelists were divided on how Washington should approach antitrust legislation proposals, referencing six antitrust bills introduced to Congress in June 2021 that target big tech companies. Those bills – including the American Choice and Innovation Online Act, H.R. 3816, Platform Competition and Opportunity Act, H.R. 3826, Ending Platform Monopolies Act, H.R. 3825, Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act, H.R. 3849, Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, H.R. 3843, and State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act, H.R. 3460 – aim to rein in the power of Big Tech through anticompetitive measures, new merger and acquisition review, and providing government enforcers more power to break-up or separate big businesses.

Sean Heather, senior vice president of international regulatory affairs and antitrust from the U.S. Chamber of Congress, criticized current antitrust laws saying it will hurt U.S. competition in the global world. He said “the answer is not to do it through antitrust” or implementing “sweeping judgement” that puts all businesses under one rubric. Instead, he suggested “targeted legislation” that would address individual issues of each business.

Clete Willems, from the Atlantic Council’s geoeconomics center, said that many of the proposed antitrust laws are ineffective. He stated a major flaw of these bills is that they penalize big technology companies because of their size, instead of for abuses of market power in common business practices.

Willems said that the bills simply ban “big tech companies because they are big but are not tying it to abuse of market power. That to me illustrates the fundamental problem with this agenda.”

Some panelists echoed flaws presented by Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in April, saying that antitrust regulation could hamper U.S. competition in the tech world or negatively hurt customers, as FTC Commissioner Noah Phillips said in May.