U.S. Senate likely to pass bill to bar Apple, Google, other tech firms from favoring themselves in searches

U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar and lawmakers from both parties said on Wednesday they had the Senate votes needed to pass legislation aimed at reining in Meta’s Facebook, Apple, Alphabet’s Google, and Amazon.com from favoring their own businesses in search results and other ways. Klobuchar and U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley urged a vote be taken.
The United States Capitol Building
Diane Bartz for Reuters:

“We wouldn’t be asking for a vote if we didn’t think we could get 60 votes,” said Klobuchar, who was flanked by Senator Chuck Grassley, a Republican who backs the bill, and House sponsors Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat, and Ken Buck, a Republican.
In the Senate, bills generally need support from 60 senators to cut off debate and move to a vote on final passage.
The Senate is expected to vote on the bill this summer, perhaps as early as late June, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The House is then expected to vote on the Senate version, sources said.
“This bill has to pass in June,” said Buck. Grassley said: “We need a Senate vote. And we need that Senate vote to be soon.”
The tech giants have said the bill would imperil popular consumer products like Google Maps and Amazon Basics and make it harder for the companies to protect their users’ security and privacy.

MacDailyNews Take: Why does the legislation require a market value of at least $550 billion to qualify for regulation, thereby excluding the likes of Walmart, Target, Samsung, etc.? Are any of these U.S. Senators invested in any of the companies that are spared from regulation and thus likely to benefit from this legislation becoming law?
The Senate proposal, like its House companion, requires nondiscrimination between products, services, or lines of businesses offered by only a handful of online services that would have the unintended consequences of disrupting Americans’ use of integrated tech services they like, and weakening U.S. competitiveness.
It is concerning that the country with the strongest tech industry and producers of some of the most popular digital products appears to be gravitating towards government-mandated industrial policies used in other countries with less robust innovation. The type of government industrial intervention proposed is what we’d expect to see from China, Russia, and other countries. These policies would actually hold back U.S. companies as they compete with China and other countries.
These proposals need to be thoroughly examined so Congress can understand the innovation, competition and national security implications. — Computer & Communications Industry Association (of which Amazon, Apple, and Google are members) Vice President Arthur Sidney, October 19, 2021
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