Antitrust

A New Bipartisan Bill Promises Innovation and Choice. It Will Deliver Neither.

The recently reintroduced American Innovation and Choice Online Act is a departure from America’s current antitrust regime, not an improvement.

Jack Nicastro | 6.17.2026 1:55 PM

Share on FacebookShare on XShare on RedditShare by emailPrint friendly versionCopy page URL Add Reason to Google

Media Contact & Reprint Requests

(Adani Samat/Midjourney)

Last week, a group of bipartisan lawmakers reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). Although it promises to deliver innovation and choice in the technology sector, AICOA would undermine both.

As currently written, AICOA would place restrictions on "systemically important platforms"—Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft—and limit their ability to engage in a wide range of common business practices. These practices include self-preferencing, ranking or presenting results in ways users find useful, tying products or services together, and using nonpublic data from their business users to "compete with products or services offered by business users," among others. 

If AICOA's goal is to "restore online competition," as its supporters claim, it shouldn't make it harder for platforms to compete. But as a coalition of more than 30 organizations and individuals makes clear in a letter to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) and Dick Durbin (D–Ill.), that is precisely what the bill does by abandoning key........

© Reason.com