How big tech defeated the biggest antitrust push in decades on Capitol Hill

A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta. The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington, and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat. The years-long legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabets Google, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms, and Apple for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public. The closely watched bills advanced farther than any other antitrust overhaul in decades and emerged from an 18-month House investigation led by Rhode Island Democrat Rep. David Cicilline. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act would have prevented the tech giants from using their platforms to disadvantage competitors, while the Open App Markets Act would have pared back Apple’s and Google’s control over app stores. Despite an aggressive eleventh-hour push, the bills were not included in the end-of-year spending package, the final shot this year.