Congress Must Halt Big Tech’s Power Grab

Big Tech has far too much power. Ahey have a chokehold over essential channels of communication and commerce, allowing them to be gatekeepers to the digital world. They vacuum up a trove of personal information about users—what they see, hear, read, think and buy. And they distort the “marketplace of ideas.” Congress must act quickly to prohibit the tech giants from unfairly leveraging their dominance into more markets. This doesn’t mean rewriting the antitrust laws but rather taking these three steps:

1. Prohibit dominant platforms from giving their own products an unfair advantage by reserving for themselves higher-quality access than they grant competitors.
2. Prohibit Big Tech from using dominant platforms to extract competitors’ business data and exploiting that data in developing competing products.
3. Protect consumer privacy. Congress has yet to address the massive amount of personal information these companies already collect.

[Bill Barr served as U.S. attorney general, 1991-93 and 2019-20.]