Battle lines |
It’s a familiar fight. For years, small- and medium-sized business have argued that they can’t compete on the platforms and app stores run by companies like Apple, Google and Amazon. The Silicon Valley giants, for their part, argue that their rules are fair and their services provide huge value to Main Street businesses.
Who’s winning? This week it looks like the smaller tech companies have the upper hand in Washington—at least for now.
The latest drama stemmed from a bill authored by Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar and Republican Senator Chuck Grassley that is scheduled for a hearing on Thursday. The measure aims to prohibit companies such as Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google from giving priority to their own products on their platforms. It would also block them from using non-public data obtained from companies using their platforms in order to buttress their own competing products.
A coalition of smaller tech players including Patreon, Yelp and DuckDuckGo have backed the bill, arguing that dominant technology companies have made it difficult for other businesses to compete in the digital marketplace because they give themselves preferential treatment and access on their platforms. On Wednesday, in a roughly hour-long debrief, a group including the chief executives of Yelp and Sonos Inc. argued the same to White House advisers, Bloomberg reported. Apple and Google have said that the legislative proposal would hurt their ability to maintain the security and privacy of their services and consequently harm consumers.
As my colleague Anna Edgerton pointed out,
the bill has an impressive array of bipartisan cosponsors but has yet
to get much attention from congressional leaders who would schedule it
for a vote in the Democratic-led House and Senate. And while the White
House appears interested in building consensus for the measure, it so
far doesn’t plan to openly endorse the legislation, Bloomberg has
reported.
This idea that smaller businesses are forced to play by
unfair rules set by major technology platforms in order to reach
customers is gaining traction. More than three dozen state attorneys
general last year sued Google arguing that the company makes it hard for
developers to go outside the Google Play store to reach users, but then
collects an “extravagant” commission. Washington D.C. attorney General
Karl Racine sued Amazon over its third-party marketplace. Other state
attorneys general and the Lina Khan-led Federal Trade Commission have
recently been raising questions about how Meta’s Oculus division is
handling third-party developers selling programs on its headsets.
The antitrust push has been long-gestating, but its greatest impacts may be yet to come. —Naomi Nix