A bipartisan group of lawmakers, led by Senators Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat, and Chuck Grassley, a Republican, will present a bill that would prevent big-tech platforms like Amazon and Google from favoring their products and services.
Klobuchar is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee, while Grassley is the main Republican on the full committee, with support from Democrats such as Senator Dick Durbin, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Richard Blumenthal, Cory Booker, Mazie Hirono and Mark Warner, and Republicans Lindsey Graham, John Kennedy, Cynthia Lummis and Josh Hawley.
After reviewing thousands of confidential Amazon documents, the retail giant’s India business ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulate search results to promote its own private brands in the nation and one of the company’s key growth markets.
The latest bill is one of many that have already been introduced in this Congress to keep tech companies, including Facebook and Apple, at bay; none of them has been enacted, though one, a broader measure to increase resources for antitrust watchdogs, has passed the Senate.
The bill, which Klobuchar’s office says will be formally filed early next week, would be a companion measure to a measure that has already passed the House Judiciary Committee and needs to pass both chambers of Congress to become law.
Klobuchar and Grassley’s bill would explicitly prohibit platforms from requiring companies operating on their websites to use the platform’s goods or services and prohibit them from distorting search results to favor the platform.
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