Congress has brought the American Innovation and Choice Online Act back from the dead, reviving a bipartisan push to stop dominant tech platforms from putting their own products first.
Senators Amy Klobuchar and Chuck Grassley reintroduced the bill on June 10, four years after an earlier version built real momentum and then died without a Senate floor vote. The legislation targets what supporters call "self-preferencing" - when a platform like an app store or a search engine promotes its own services over competing ones. It applies only to the largest online platforms and would make that conduct a federal violation. Apple and its peers spent heavily lobbying against the earlier version, and nothing about their financial interests in the outcome has changed.
Europe's Digital Markets Act already covers this ground - and has forced Apple to open its App Store to alternative payment systems in ways it resisted for years in US courts. AICOA would give American regulators a statutory basis for the same outcomes, rather than grinding through slow, case-by-case antitrust litigation. That shortcut matters: the DOJ's open cases against Apple and Google have moved at a pace measured in years, not quarters.
Bipartisan backing helped this bill get further than most tech regulation does. It also helped it die last time.