If you want to know how worried an industry is about a piece of pending legislation, a decent metric is how apocalyptic its predictions are about what the bill would do. By that standard, Big Tech is deeply troubled by the American Innovation and Choice Online Act.Perhaps the scariest talking point is that the law, if enacted, would kill Amazon Prime. According to eMarketer, more than 150 million Americans, more than half the adult population, are Prime members. That’s a lot of people who might hate to lose their “free” two-day shipping. (It’s not really free, of course, if you have to pay a subscription fee.)
The infelicitously named bill is designed to prevent dominant online platforms—like Apple and Facebook and, especially, Google and Amazon—from giving themselves an advantage over other businesses that must go through them to reach customers. As one of two antitrust bills voted out of committee by a strong bipartisan vote (the other would regulate app stores), it may be this Congress’ best, even only, shot to stop the biggest tech companies from abusing their gatekeeper status[...] Continue reading @ arstechnica.com
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