American policymakers are increasingly determined to curb the power of Big Tech ‘gatekeepers’. Bipartisan support means these initiatives have legs
Antitrust legislation in the US is finding bipartisan support: On 11 August three senators (two Democrats and one Republican) introduced a bill to increase competition in the market for app stores. The starting point of the proposal is that Apple and Google have “gatekeeper control” of the two dominant mobile operating systems of the respective app stores, which allows them to exclusively dictate the terms of the app market. The Open App Markets Act would apply to app stores with more than 50m users in the US. Crucially these app stores would not be able to force app developers to use the store’s in-app payment system. Developers would also be free to set different pricing terms and conditions across app stores. This proposal follows the set of five bills introduced in June to reform the entire antitrust framework for the digital economy, which increasingly are also supported by a significant proportion of Republicans.
Several regulators see app stores as the bottleneck: The French regulator ARCEP was the first to see the Apple/Google duopoly as a potential ‘weak link’ in achieving an open internet in 2018, and proposed a range of remedies to protect competition. More recently, the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act proposal addressed similar concerns (for example by ensuring consumers can uninstall pre-installed apps) and the UK competition authority, the CMA launched a market study into Apple and Google to assess whether consumers are losing out from this duopoly.
Various disputes have given policymakers an attempt to intervene: The EC is siding with Spotify following the company’s allegations that Apple forces it to charge excessively high prices and hinders the availability of the app. In the US and Australia, the game maker Epic is amid legal battles with Apple and Google over conditions to use the respective stores’ payment systems. The proposed act looks precisely tailored to address the problems highlighted by the Spotify and Epic cases. Unsurprisingly it has been well received by these two companies and by Tile, whose products compete directly with Apple AirTags. The bipartisan nature of the proposal could mean it wins the support it needs – especially considering the sentiment a large part of the Republican Party has towards Big Tech, and the Biden administration's record so far in bringing together both sides of congress on key issues.
