Coalition Urges Congress to Reject AICOA

WASHINGTON-In a joint letter led by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) and the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT), a coalition of more than 30 organizations and individuals is urging Congress to reject the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), warning that the bill would impose unnecessary limitations on America's leading digital platforms' ability to engage in common platform practices-threatening consumers, businesses of all sizes, and U.S. technology leadership.

AICOA would target a small set of digital platforms based on revenue and user thresholds without any demonstration of actual market dominance. It places heavy restrictions on widespread product-design and platform-management practices related to security, integration, and maintaining consumer trust. The coalition urges Congress to set AICOA aside and to police digital markets using existing antitrust laws, which already give enforcers ample authority to address concerns about anticompetitive conduct by large technology firms, as evidenced by ongoing actions brought by the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission against Apple, Google, Amazon, and Meta.

The letter, sent to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Ranking Member Dick Durbin, highlights three core concerns with AICOA:

• Targeting firms based on sheer size without requiring any demonstration that they enjoy market dominance, which creates unjustified legal exposure where there is no proven risk of harm to competition;
• Making ordinary and overwhelmingly procompetitive product design, platform management, integration, and security practices legally suspect; and
• Sending a signal that the United States endorses the same kind of digital antitrust policies as the European Union's failed Digital Markets Act (DMA), which the U.S. has sought to push back against globally.

"Amidst the global tidal wave of digital antitrust regulations targeting American firms, passing AICOA is absolutely one of the worst things we could do to support U.S. technology leadership," said Joseph Coniglio, Senior Counsel and Director of the Schumpeter Project on Competition Policy at ITIF. "AICOA mirrors the DMA not only by not requiring any demonstration that covered firms have market dominance but presumptively condemning a wide range of business practices without any proof of anticompetitive harm and not allowing firms to generally offer procompetitive defenses. That is a fundamental departure from how U.S. antitrust law evaluates unilateral behavior under the Sherman Act to address non-existent market failures in America's thriving digital sector."

The coalition also warns that AICOA would create significant risks for startups and small businesses that rely on integrated digital services for security, discovery, fraud prevention, payments, and global distribution. By making ordinary platform management newly suspect, the bill would raise costs, increase legal uncertainty, and make it harder for startups and small firms to compete with well established brands.

"Europe's experience with the DMA shows that these rules impose untenable costs on small business innovators," said Graham Dufault, General Counsel of the Association for Competitive Technology. "DMA has already undermined consumer trust in curated marketplaces, delayed access to new tools, degraded product features, increased uncertainty, and shifted costs onto smaller developers that are disadvantaged by the disintegration of their preferred marketplaces. AICOA would risk replicating those harms in the United States, especially for startups and small businesses that depend on secure, integrated digital ecosystems to reach customers and compete globally."

Congress should reject AICOA.

Contact: Sydney Mack, [email protected]