This morning John Bresnahan and Jake Sherman had a quick couple of paragraphs for Punchbowl News about presidential hopeful Amy Klobuchar’s Big Tech anti-trust bill, which she talked about on the Senate floor last night for the better part of an hour. They wrote that the bill “would bar Big Tech companies from using their market dominance to push their own products or services over any competitors, [which] was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee back in January. But the legislation has stalled in the face of an intense lobbying campaign by Google, Amazon and other giant tech companies. And we do mean intense. Klobuchar told us Tuesday she still hasn’t been told by leadership when it might come to the floor.”
I’m guessing the big tech firms have bribed Schumer to keep it off the floor, which is doing, although he claims he’s "working with Klobuchar on passing the legislation, adding: 'I support these bills. I want to bring them to the floor. We have to see if we have 60 votes.'" Schumer’s a goddamn reptilian liar.
I asked Alan Grayson, one of the sharpest attorneys I’ve ever met— and a candidate for his old House seat in Orlando— how he feels about Klobuchar’s bill— and the companion bill David Cicilline (D-RI) is trying to get passed in the House, where it’s “been hung up since last summer,” probably for the same reasons— though because of Pelosi and Hoyer, rather than Schumer.
Grayson told me that much of what Klobuchar is proposing “is already illegal. The real issue is the gutting of DOJ’s Antitrust Division, for decades now, and that is a problem that can be solved by… President Joe Biden.”
Much of Lucas Kunce's Missouri Senate campaign has involved talking with his state's voters about the dangers of modern day monopolies. "Big Tech, he told me today, "is the Big Tobacco of the 21st century. Big Tech is a massive monopoly that's dividing our communities, destroying our small businesses, and undermining our country's national security. Want to know why nobody does anything about it? Because a ton of Congress Members literally own stock in Big Tech companies. It's criminal. We need aggressive action to break big tech up, and more Members of Congress should be supporting legislation like this instead of checking their Facebook stock every day."
Last January during the committee markup, Feinstein and Padilla-- who both notoriously corrupt and completely in the pocket of Big Tech-- whined that the bill shouldn't be targeting specific companies, namely their big donors. One of the giants, Amazon, is based in Washington state and I asked House candidate Jason Call how he feels about dealing with the Big Tech monopoly problem. “The irony that a bill to prevent tech monopolies from pushing out market competition is going to die because they are using their political influence in Congress to push out competition. Reading a May article from The Hill we see exactly what is at work here-- senators who were supportive of the bill six months ago are now worried they’ll come under fire from tech giants based in their home states... if anyone wondered why Washington Senators Murray and Cantwell aren’t cosponsors of this legislation."
