Kevin Dietsch/REUTERS
- Sen. Amy Klobuchar released a sweeping anti-trust bill on Thursday.
- Big Tech stock reactions were muted despite the possibility of serious fines for anti-competitive behavior.
- “I don’t want to punish success,” the senator said. “When we talk about structural remedies and breaking things up, those companies would be unleashed to do even more.”
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Senator Amy Klobuchar released a sweeping antitrust reform bill on Thursday in one of her first acts as the Senate Judiciary subcommittee’s new chair on antitrust.
While new antitrust regulations might normally cause shares of mega-cap tech companies to fall, investors seem to have mostly shrugged off the proposed bill. Shares of such juggernauts as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and Alphabet ranged from slightly lower to flat on Thursday.
Sen. Klobuchar’s Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act combines a number of existing proposals into one omnibus bill with the goal of preventing monopolies from limiting competition in the US.
“We have a major monopoly problem in this country, which harms consumers and threatens free and fair competition across our economy. Companies need to be put on notice that exclusionary behavior that threatens competition cannot continue,” Klobuchar said in a statement discussing the bill.
The bill would increase the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission's ability to fine big tech companies for breaching anti-trust laws. Currently, the max fine is $100 million, but Klobuchar's bill would dramatically increase that figure, allowing regulators to fine Big Tech firms for up to 15% of their annual revenue.
This isn't the first crackdown on large tech firms of late, either. Aggressive acquisitions and anti-competitive behaviors stirred lawmakers into action in 2020.
In October, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Facebook were the subject of a 450-page House Judiciary report that compared the companies to "the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons."
And Google is currently the subject of a major antitrust investigation by the Department of Justice while Facebook is being investigated by the FTC and 46 attorneys general over its reportedly anti-competitive acquisitions.
Klobuchar appeared on CNBC's "Squawk Box" on Thursday to discuss her new bill and led with a reassuring tone for big tech investors.
"I don't want to punish success. When we talk about structural remedies and breaking things up, those companies would then be unleashed to do even more," the Senator said.
When pushed by anchor Andrew Sorkin about the increasing competition in social media and other spaces from new entrants like Clubhouse and TikTok, Klobuchar responded by saying, "my concern is that while we're seeing really good things happening, we also know there's really bad things happening."
"We don't have the remedies in place. We don't have the resources for some of the agencies. And some of the legal standards just don't fit the sophisticated marketplace we see today," Klobuchar added.
The Democratic Senator called her bill an attempt at "balancing things out again," rather than an attack on big tech.