Big Tech bills left out of sweeping government spending bill

Bipartisan bills targeting the nation’s largest tech firms failed to make it into the $1.7 trillion government spending bill, squelching what supporters said was the best effort to pass the bills before House Republicans take control in the new year. 

Supporters of efforts to revamp antitrust laws, as well as update kids’ online safety regulations, hoped to add such measures to the omnibus funding bill in a last-ditch effort to pass them this year, but a swath of tech bills were left out, according to text released early Tuesday. 

A couple of less controversial antitrust reform bills, including one to update merger filing fees and another to let states choose the venue for antitrust enforcement cases, made it into the text. But on the whole, the multi-year bipartisan effort to reform competition bills to target tech giants appears to have failed as the current Congress winds down.

Supporters had been pushing for two other antitrust bills, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which aims to limit tech companies from preferencing their own products and services, and the Open App Markets Act, which aims to impose additional regulations on dominant app stores. The proposals came out of a House Judiciary Committee investigation into the market power of Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook, now under the parent company name Meta. 

Both of the bills advanced out of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees with bipartisan support, but appear to be falling by the wayside without coming up for a vote on the floor of either chamber as the 117th Congress comes to a close.

The Open App Markets Act particularly faced a last-minute opposition push from the tech industry. The Chamber of Progress, which names Apple, Google, Meta and Amazon as corporate partners, launched an ad on connected TV earlier this month slamming the bill over accusations that it would “force companies to provide a soapbox to dangerous extremists.”

Supporters of the antitrust bill said accusations like the one Chamber of Progress pushed were red herrings and not an accurate portrayal of the legislation. 

Although the antitrust bills had support on both sides of the aisle, House Republicans set to take control next year have set their sights on prioritizing content moderation concerns. The focus of top House GOP members like Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), who is slated to chair the Judiciary Committee next year, on allegations of anti-conservative “censorship” will likely push the antitrust bills to the back burner. 

In addition to antitrust reform, there was bipartisan support in Congress this year for efforts to improve kids’ online safety laws. Two bills in particular, the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) and the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule (COPPA) 2.0, gained steam. The bills advanced with bipartisan support out of the Senate Commerce committee.

Parent advocates whose children’s deaths were tied to social media met with lawmakers throughout the past couple of months in a last-minute push to pass the bills. But they ultimately failed to make it into the omnibus spending bill. 

KOSA in particular faced an opposition campaign near the end of the year from a group of human rights and LGBTQ organizations, as well as the Center for Democracy and Technology, who argued that the bill would actually make kids less safe online and disproportionately harm marginalized youth. 

But parent advocates who spoke to members of Congress, as well as kids’ safety groups such as Fairplay and ParentsTogether, said the proposal would make the internet safer for kids by adding new requirements for how companies treat young users. 

KOSA would create a duty of care for social media platforms to prevent and mitigate harm to minors, and require them to put the strictest privacy settings in place as the default for such users. 

COPPA 2.0 would update the 1998 children’s privacy law to include protections for minors aged 12-16, who are not covered by the existing law. It would also add new protections such as a ban on targeted advertising to minors. 

Some less controversial tech bills did make it into the omnibus text, including two of the antitrust proposals spawned by the House investigation. The spending bill includes the Merger Filing Fee Modernization Act, which would update filing fees to increase them for larger deals, and the Venue for State Antitrust Enforcement, which would allow states to choose where antitrust cases are heard, including cases that are pending by the date of the bill being enacted. 

The INFORM Act, which aims to verify the identity of online sellers on virtual marketplaces, is also included in the bill. 

A proposal to ban TikTok on government devices made the cut as well. The federal proposal follows momentum among GOP states to put in place the same ban on state government devices.

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