Amy Klobuchar’s antitrust push isn’t dead, the Democratic senator told Kara Swisher at a Code meeting on Tuesday.
“Never leave us out when the cause is right and needs to be addressed,” she said.
Mr. Klobuchar has been at the forefront of antitrust push in Congress, sponsoring several bipartisan and bicameral bills aimed at better regulating big tech and curbing enormous power. there is Despite what appeared to be auspicious beginnings and bipartisan interest in passing at least some of these bills, they appear to have stalled. Some have made no progress at all. Some are waiting for seat votes that never seem to come.
“There needs to be some sort of rule where there is no gatekeeper controlling who wins in the market,” she said.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICO) is one of those bills, and arguably the bill Klobuchar has defended most aggressively. It prohibits dominant digital companies from prioritizing their products over those made by others on their platforms. you can’t. Unless those products earned that spot organically. Search results unless that map and review won that spot.
AICO is the only antitrust package to pass both the House and Senate committee markups. As Klobuchar noted, it is also the first competition bill to reach a seat in the Senate since the inception of the Internet. Only two floor votes are left to head to the White House to sign the law. The Senate has been waiting for a vote since January. At the house, I have been waiting for over a year. Democratic leaders Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Chuck Schumer do not plan to vote. The reason is not clear. Klobuchar and some of his AICO sponsors, including Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), say the bill has enough votes to pass the Senate across both parties. . Schumer says he is unsure about it and will not vote until he is sure.
Klobuchar does not give an exact date for the vote or guarantee it will take place before the midterm elections. That’s the time and money it takes for a bipartisan bill to pass. Specifically, the amount that companies covered by the bill have fought against it through lobbying and advertising.
“It’s really hard to tackle these subjects when you have the largest corporations the world has ever known and you control a tremendous part of the economy,” she said. It’s an unbelievable amount of money that you’re facing.I have two lawyers.They have 2,800 lawyers and lobbyists.So I’m not clueless about David vs. Goliath.”
But Klobuchar also suggested that the deadlines many have cited for passing the bill, the midterm elections, when Republicans are expected to take over one or two houses of the House, may not be tough. Many Republicans want big tech to have guardrails, and she thinks they will stay if they take control. I don’t think I will. Her suggestion to big tech companies was to make the same concessions in the US they made in other countries before they had to.
“I finally believe in this country,” she said.
