A New Bipartisan Bill Promises Innovation and Choice. It Will Deliver Neither.

Last week, a group of bipartisan lawmakers reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). Although it promises to deliver innovation and choice in the technology sector, AICOA would undermine both.

As currently written, AICOA would place restrictions on “systemically important platforms”—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—and limit their ability to engage in a wide range of common business practices. These practices include self-preferencing, ranking or presenting results in ways users find useful, tying products or services together, and using nonpublic data from their business users to “compete with products or services offered by business users,” among others. 

If AICOA’s goal is to “restore online competition,” as its supporters claim, it shouldn’t make it harder for platforms to compete. But as a coalition of more than 30 organizations and individuals makes clear in a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D–Ill.), that is precisely what the bill does by abandoning key features of the current antitrust enforcement framework. 

Under the Sherman Antitrust Act, plaintiffs typically must establish three things to successfully sue a firm for anticompetitive conduct: that the firm has market power; that the conduct has resulted, or is likely to result, in anticompetitive harm; and that the conduct’s net anticompetitive effects outweigh any procompetitive justifications, such as facilitating innovation by allowing firms to recoup platform investments more easily.   

AICOA breaks with this established framework at every turn. 

First, it requires no demonstration that a covered platform even has market power before its rules apply. Instead, it targets firms based on arbitrary user and revenue thresholds. Second, showing harm to competition is not required for most of the practices specified in the bill to be presumptively illegal. Finally, AICOA provides defendants with only a handful of admissible procompetitive justifications, and those defenses are subject to strict scrutiny.

U.S. antitrust laws have already proven more than capable of addressing allegedly anticompetitive behavior by Big Tech. For example, last year, the Justice Department won both of its lawsuits against Google for its alleged monopolization of the search and online advertising markets under the Sherman Act. Such victories in hotly contested cases undercut the claim that regulators lack adequate tools under existing law.

As AICOA sets off an unnecessary departure from the longstanding antitrust legal paradigm, it also risks harming the economy. 

The law, if passed, would immediately harm consumers by chilling pro-competitive business practices. For example, the bill’s presumptive ban on platforms using nonpublic business-user data to launch competing products would prevent Amazon from using aggregated seller data from its platform to introduce private-label products, such as Amazon Basics, to the market—depriving consumers of comparable-quality products at lower prices. 

AICOA would also stymie innovation by undermining Big Tech’s ability to monetize the multibillion-dollar investments required to generate and sustain new products on their platforms. For example, the bill’s presentation and interoperability requirements could force Google either to limit its use of Gemini to provide AI-generated overviews within Google Search or to provide comparable access and visibility to third-party AI providers within Google’s search results. The former would deprive users of a popular feature, while the latter would allow Google’s rivals to freeride on the huge investments the company makes in its integrated ecosystem as it helps drive frontier AI development. Indeed, Google spent more than $91 billion on capital expenditures in 2025 alone and is projected to spend roughly $190 billion this year. 

The potential damage the bill could cause is not limited to the United States: It could also compromise America’s ability to defend its engines of growth abroad.  

Specifically, adopting AICOA would undermine the United States’ credibility when it attempts to push back against analogous attacks on American tech companies abroad, which threaten U.S. global technology leadership. Case in point: The E.U.’s Digital Markets Act, which bans U.S. tech leaders from engaging in many of the very same practices restricted by AICOA, has already resulted in nearly $800 million in fines and imposes an estimated $1 billion in annual compliance costs. Worse, the model is spreading worldwide, with countries like the U.K. and Japan adopting similar regimes, and many others considering it.  

Still, the fact that this legislation has fewer cosponsors today than when it was first introduced nearly five years ago gives reason for cautious optimism that this atrocious importation of European-style competition policy will never receive a floor vote.

The post A New Bipartisan Bill Promises Innovation and Choice. It Will Deliver Neither. appeared first on Reason.com.

Source: https://reason.com/2026/06/17/a-new-bipartisan-bill-promises-innovation-and-choice-it-will-deliver-neither/