House Bills Seek to Break Up Amazon and Other Big Tech Companies

House lawmakers proposed a raft of bipartisan legislation aimed at reining in the country’s biggest tech companies, including a bill that seeks to make Amazon and other large corporations effectively split in two or shed their private-label products. The bills, introduced June 11, amount to the biggest congressional broadside yet on a handful of technology companies—Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook—whose size and power have drawn growing scrutiny from lawmakers and regulators in the US and Europe. If the bills become law—a prospect that faces significant hurdles—they could substantially alter the most richly valued companies in America and reshape an industry that has extended its impact into nearly every facet of work and life. One of the proposed measures, titled the Ending Platform Monopolies Act, seeks to require structural separation of Amazon and other big technology companies to break up their businesses.