New Antitrust Bills Abandon Consumers And Hurt U.S. Competitiveness
Today, House Democrats launched the biggest attack yet on our nation’s most successful companies by introducing onerous regulation under the guise of antitrust reform. The proposed bills block America’s pathway to more innovations and conveniences at a time we need them most, while giving other countries an advantage to lead the innovation space. Specifically, the proposed antitrust bills would …
Ban conveniences that consumers love, writes Adam Kovacevich, Founder and CEO of Chamber of Progress. “Giving antitrust enforcers more funding and encouraging data portability are relatively uncontroversial ideas, but banning conveniences like Amazon Basics brand batteries, Apple’s Find my Phone tool, or Google Maps appearing in Google search results are ideas that would spark a consumer backlash. Instead of focusing on helping families, these proposals inexplicably target a bunch of technological conveniences that most people really like.”
Take “money out of consumers’ pockets to prop up failing competitors,” writes Neil Chilson, senior research fellow at the Charles Koch Institute. “The more directly competition-related bills have big problems, too. They treat certain companies as guilty until proven innocent and prohibit certain business structures no matter how efficient, indirectly taking money out of consumers’ pockets to prop up failing competitors.”
– Weaken American companies and put U.S. economic leadership at risk. “In sum, the bills would hobble America’s world-leading tech industry. European leaders surely hope the Biden admin joins their governments in scapegoating American tech companies. But Congress should worry about strengthening foreign competitors by weakening American companies.”
Remove key incentives to innovate, ignoring the needs of startups, explains Sam Bowman, Director of Competition Policy at International Center for Law & Economics. “They ignore the importance of incentives for innovation. Platforms invest in new and better products when they can make money from doing so, and limiting their ability to do that means weakened incentives to innovate. Startups and their founders and investors are driven, in part, by the prospect of being acquired, often by the platforms themselves. Making those acquisitions more difficult, or even impossible, means removing one of the key ways startup founders can exit their firms, and hence one of the key rewards and incentives for starting an innovative new business.”