Taxpayers Protection Alliance Weighs in AICOA

For Immediate Release                                          Contact: Abigail Graham: (202) 417-7235

June 16, 2023                                                               

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, a bipartisan coalition of senators reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), a sweeping online competition package that failed to clear the 117th Congress. AICOA would introduce heavy regulatory burdens on tech companies that exceed certain arbitrary size thresholds, preventing them from engaging in standard business practices that economic research shows conclusively to be pro-competitive and pro-consumer. What’s more, it targets only the tech sector, which has proved a consistently deflationary force in inflationary times.

The Taxpayers Protection Alliance’s (TPA) Executive Director, Patrick Hedger, offered the following comment:

“Like an obnoxious friend you explicitly disinvited from the party, AICOA is back. Don’t be fooled – this proposal would in fact crush technological innovation and consumer choice in the digital economy.

“Economists have warned that the bill will stifle economic growth and raise prices for consumers. Privacy experts have identified colossal threats it poses to Americans online security. And observers have generally wondered at its many internal contradictions and economic incongruities.

“As previous generations of economic micromanagers have discovered, attempts to impose idiosyncratic conceptions of ‘fair’ competition cause real harm. Those harms are paid primarily not by politicians, but by their constituents whose pocketbooks can ill afford inflated prices.

“The bill would also vest extensive new powers in an unprecedentedly aggressive Federal Trade Commission (FTC). The current FTC, by its leadership’s own admission, seeks to reclaim the unbounded, more-or-less arbitrary authority that a concerned Congress, judicial branch, and legal community wrestled from it half a century ago.

“AICOA’s proponents openly admit that their goal is for American digital economy regulation to more closely resemble that of  Europe. Yet, our continental friends’ failure to develop anything resembling a competitive tech sector speaks to the danger of bringing their failed regulatory schemes to this side of the Atlantic.

“For all these reasons, the bill is losing friends – and fast. Three Republican and two Democratic senators have chosen not to co-sponsor it this time around. TPA applauds them for revising their previous position based on the facts and evidence observers have presented, and it urges their colleagues to follow their lead.”

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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.