Klobuchar, Cotton introduce bill to rein in on big tech M&A
Big Tech companies are the focus of U.S. lawmakers again as Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Tom Cotton introduced a bill on Friday aimed at curtailing big acquisitions by "dominant" online platforms.
“Big tech firms have bought up rivals to crush their competition, expand their monopolistic market share, and to harm working Americans," Cotton (R-AR) said in a statement. "That’s bad for America. Under this bill, the largest tech monopolies will have the burden of proving that further acquisitions are lawful and good for the American people."
Big tech companies like $Meta Platforms(FB.US$ , $Amazon(AMZN.US$ , and $Alphabet-C(GOOG.US$ $Alphabet-A(GOOGL.US$ have been the targets of Congress in the past year as legislators see the companies wielding too much power and influence. Just last month, Sens. Klobuchar and Charles Grassley introduced a different bill aimed at reining in some of the activities of the likes of Amazon and Google.
The bill, introduced by the two senators on Friday, aims to give antitrust enforcers more authority to stop acquisition of direct competitors or potential competitors and to shift the burden in merger enforcement to dominant platforms to demonstrate the merger is not anticompetitive.
Klobuchar also introduced a bill in February aimed at making it more difficult for large corporations to get mergers approved and gives agencies such as the FTC and the Justice Department "sharper teeth."
Also see, Key lawmakers urge FTC to keep up antitrust pressure on Facebook.
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Dogoro777 : Big government authoritarianism is bipartisan, this comes as a shock to nobody. Unconstitutional and anti-American.
Aaron_Kelly : Biden will never sign a bill that does any harm whatever to FB and GOOG, unless the entire Congress signs on and if it's a veto-proof bill, and they're not going to.
Austin ONeill : Democrats want to destroy free-markets and capitalism, and some Republicans want revenge on corporate American for Trump's incompetent 2020 campaign and subsequent defeat.
Kieron Morley : if nobody buys these small startups their value is automatically worth 1/10th or less of what people think they are worth
William Paul : Tech is indestructible