Proposals to rein in the world's largest technology companies have gained steam in recent years. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), introduced in the House and Senate in 2021, is a bipartisan bill that, if passed, would prohibit some of Big Tech's most anticompetitive practices, especially self-preferencing and gatekeeping of essential online marketplaces.
AICOA would prohibit large platform owners (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, TikTok) from using their dominant market power to unfairly advance their economic interests over other firms. For example, AICOA would stop companies from artificially elevating their own products to the top of search results. It would also stop companies from using non-public data to copy products from small retailers that sell on their platforms and would prohibit the removal of competitors from platforms for self-serving reasons.
Along with millions in attack ads, Big Tech companies – led by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, known as the Big Four – deployed an overpowering inside game to stymie AICOA. This analysis focuses on three main categories of inside pressure: lobbying, contributions, and connections. Doing so revealed that those opposed to AICOA have been able to overwhelm supporters in every category, often by wide margins.
What to read next
Published by
Copyright
- Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License