American Principles Project (APP) is urging House Republicans to support a series of antitrust bills that will be marked up in the House Judiciary Committee this week, including:
- The American Choice and Innovation Online Act
- The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act
- The Ending Platform Monopolies Act
- The Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching (ACCESS) Act
- The Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act
- The State Antitrust Enforcement Venue Act
Jon Schweppe, APP’s director of policy and government affairs, released the following statement:
“For more than a century, Republicans have recognized that antitrust enforcement is necessary to preserve the free market and prevent the consolidation of power around anti-competitive monopolies. Antitrust enforcement becomes even more important when we’re talking about Big Tech companies that exert control over the free flow of information and directly interfere in our elections.
“We believe these bills represent the best opportunity in the near term to successfully rein in Big Tech. There’s a reason that the Big Tech monopolists, and the allied groups they fund in Washington, D.C., are lobbying so aggressively against this legislation. They recognize that these bipartisan bills pose a real threat to their concentrated power.
“Republicans intuitively understand the need to defend speech online, which is why many prefer reforming Section 230 over antitrust enforcement. We are sympathetic to that argument — APP has long advocated for Section 230 reform that promotes free speech and free expression. But why not pursue both strategies, especially when one has a better chance of succeeding in this Congress? There will be no Section 230 reform that defends free speech while the Democrats control Congress. But these antitrust bills offer an opportunity for rare bipartisan agreement, and Republicans should take advantage of it to limit the power of these enormous platforms.
“The idea that antitrust enforcement somehow isn’t conservative is silly. Each of these bills has at least three GOP cosponsors. House Republicans should not heed voices from outside groups whose idea of a ‘conservative’ solution amounts to little more than bluster and cashed checks from Google. We urge members to consider each of these bills individually on their merits and vote accordingly.
“Republicans cannot afford to do with Big Tech what they did with Obamacare, where they told voters to wait until they controlled the House, Senate, and White House, and then still did nothing. If the GOP now has the opportunity to rein in the power of Big Tech, even if it means working with Democrats, they need to take it.”
