Watchdog Blasts Senate Antitrust Overreach

For Immediate Release                                                                                              Contact: Courtney Mattison (202-525-7492)

October 14, 2021                                                                                                                             

Washington, D.C. – Today, the Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA), a nonprofit, nonpartisan taxpayer and consumer advocacy organization warned consumers and Congress about legislation introduced by a bipartisan group of senators led by Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.). The sweeping legislation would ban America’s most successful technology firms from engaging in practices that are commonplace in the offline world, such as self-preferencing. This would fundamentally alter the internet and personal devices such as smartphones, dramatically harming consumer convenience and security.

TPA Vice President of Policy Patrick Hedger offered the following statement:

“The least of the concerns for American consumers now are Amazon Prime, cheaper generic goods, preloaded iPhones, Google Maps, and seamless interoperability between Facebook’s services. Yet, this legislation threatens all of these modern day conveniences that make Americans’ lives easier.  All of these are products that consumers have demanded from these companies and Congress wants to take them away. Under the ruse of promoting competition, a bipartisan group of senators have given in to pressure from lobbyists of less-successful technology companies to use antitrust law to destroy the products and services Americans have chosen as the most convenient and valuable in favor of their own. It’s absolutely shameful to craft antitrust law to only limit the most successful competitors above a certain, arbitrary market-cap in a narrowly-defined market such as the tech space. Legislating to punish specific firms versus crafting laws that apply to all businesses is not the proper role of government. Companies in the tech sector should be able to engage in the same practices that brick-and-mortar retailers have done since the dawn of that industry. There’s no reason to ban them from doing so other than to rig the game. There’s nothing pro-competition about that.”

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Taxpayers Protection Alliance (TPA) is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to educating the public through the research, analysis and dissemination of information on the government’s effects on the economy.