Vulnerable U.S. Senate Democrats back off bill seeking Big Tech crackdown

A bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the nation’s largest tech companies is facing fresh resistance from a faction of Senate Democrats vulnrable to defeat in the 2022 midterm elections, Politico reports citing “10 people familiar with the matter.”
The United States Capitol Building
Adam Cancryn and Emily Birnbaum for Politico:

The internal opposition comes as Democratic leaders are pushing for a vote on the bill by summer, in an effort to pass what has become a central element of the party’s broader antitrust agenda.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, S. 2992 (117) — led by Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) — would ban major tech firms like Amazon and Google from favoring their products over their competitors.
Yet in the days since Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told Klobuchar he would hold a floor vote as early as next month, several Democratic senators have privately expressed deep reservations about voting for the legislation, particularly with a midterm election looming, in their conversations with Schumer and other Democratic offices…
The behind-the-scenes consternation could jeopardize the legislation’s path to a floor vote — and with it, Democrats’ long-running bid to bolster oversight of the handful of companies that dominate the tech industry.
Separately, several Democrats, including California Sens. Alex Padilla and Dianne Feinstien, have raised concerns about the bill’s targeting of specific Silicon Valley companies, such as Apple and Facebook’s parent company, Meta. There are also lingering worries about the possible unintended consequences of such wide-ranging legislation raised by the tech giants, who have warned it could create cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

MacDailyNews Take: Again, Apple should not be lumped in with the likes of Alphabet/Google which actually does have a monopoly (which is legal, by the way) and is may or may not be abusing it (which is subject to any antitrust reform remedies).
The fact is that Apple has no monopoly in smartphones, or in any other market, so Apple is incapable of committing monopoly abuse.
Worldwide smartphone OS market share, April 2022:
• Android: 71.59%
• iOS: 27.68%
Worldwide desktop OS market share, April 2022:
• Windows: 74.79%
• macOS: 15.3%
I don’t think anybody reasonable is going to come to the conclusion that Apple is a monopoly. Our share is much more modest. We don’t have a dominant position in any market… We are not a monopoly. — Apple CEO Tim Cook, June 2019
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