Congress’s Big Antitrust Bills Have a Problem: The Happy Customer
Conflicting political crosscurrents are making it impossible to protect competition in ways that also protect consumers.
A pair of bills that take aim at vertical integration in Big Tech—regulating app stores and prohibiting the highest-profile platforms from favoring their own services (a practice known as self-preferencing)—is lying in wait in Congress. While it’s still in dispute how much of an impact the laws would have on the marketplace, what is beyond question is that they would change the way iPhones, Google search and Amazon services operate going forward.
Not surprisingly, the companies most affected by these proposals have raised the alarm. What company wants to see its products degraded or altered by the federal government? But it’s also true that hundreds of millions of American consumers enjoy using these products and services—and that happy voters don’t write letters to their senator or march on the National Mall.