Senate Judiciary leaders introduce bipartisan online competition bill for Big Tech platforms

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Senate bipartisan online competition bill

Highlights

The American Innovation and Choice Online Act targets platforms with at least $175 billion annual revenue and 34% U.S. household reach, restricting self-preferencing and discriminatory conduct.
Enforcement powers extend to DOJ, FTC, and state attorneys general through civil actions, with protections for legal compliance, safety, privacy, and intellectual property preserved.
Bipartisan sponsors and broad industry backing increase momentum for the bill, potentially raising compliance burdens on dominant tech platforms and expanding legal recourse for rivals and regulators.

Bill framework and enforcement scope

As reported by the Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Amy Klobuchar introduce the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, a measure aimed at restoring online competition and affordability by restricting how the biggest digital platforms treat rivals and business users.

The bill allows the Department of Justice, the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general to challenge discriminatory or exclusionary conduct by the world’s largest online platforms. It is enforced through civil actions in federal courts and includes protections for safety, privacy, intellectual property, national security and constitutional interests, while preserving popular digital services.

AICOA applies only to platforms with at least $175 billion in average annual gross revenue and at least 34% of U.S. subscriber households or 34% of U.S. monthly active users over age 12. Covered companies are barred from favoring their own products, misusing nonpublic business-user data, limiting competitors’ access to key features, blocking data portability, retaliating against users who raise legal concerns, unfairly enforcing terms of service, tying platform access to unrelated services, locking users into default settings and skewing rankings against similarly situated business users.

The legislation also states that covered platforms can defend conduct needed to comply with the law, prevent fraud or protect safety, privacy, nonpublic data and platform security. It does not require disclosure of intellectual property, trade secrets or confidential business processes, and it does not mandate data sharing with foreign adversaries or allow enforcers to dictate AI development, product design, ranking policy or content outcomes.

Political backing and digital market impact

Grassley says a small number of dominant companies control what Americans can buy, hear and say online, and argues that abuse of market power raises costs for consumers and small businesses. Klobuchar says the U.S. faces a monopoly problem and that dominant platforms increasingly preference their own products and services, narrowing opportunities for entrepreneurs and workers in the digital marketplace.

Additional cosponsors include Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dick Durbin and Senators Josh Hawley, Sheldon Whitehouse and Cory Booker. The measure also has backing from companies and advocacy groups including Mozilla, Y Combinator, Proton, Yelp, DuckDuckGo, Fox Corporation, Replit, Travel Tech and Internet Works, alongside antitrust scholars, labor groups and public-interest organizations.

For the technology sector, the bill signals continued bipartisan scrutiny of platform self-preferencing, data use and access terms in the U.S. digital economy. If advanced, it could raise compliance demands for the largest platforms while widening legal avenues for rivals, business users and regulators seeking to challenge conduct seen as distorting online competition.

In our earlier coverage of the Senate Banking Committee’s AI policy hearing, we detailed how lawmakers framed artificial intelligence as a growing economic and national-security priority. The discussion focused on balancing innovation with safeguards against fraud and labor disruption, while also weighing export controls to limit advanced AI capabilities reaching adversaries such as China.

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