When Big Tech Brought Left and Right Together on Antitrust

On October 6, 2020, four weeks before a presidential election that had the country at each other's throats, the Democratic staff of a House Judiciary subcommittee released a report of roughly 450 pages about four companies most Americans touch before breakfast. Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, it concluded after a sixteen-month investigation, had each come to hold monopoly power over a key channel of commerce or communication, and had used that power in ways that hurt rivals, suppliers and the public. The headline writers went straight for the obvious frame: Democrats versus Silicon Valley. The more interesting document came out alongside it, under the name of a Republican from the plains of eastern Colorado. Ken Buck, a former prosecutor with a solidly conservative voting record, put out his own response. He did not sign on to everything. But on the core finding, that these firms had too much power and the government had been asleep, he agreed. In an election season built on the idea that the two parties could not agree on what day it was, that was a small, strange, important thing.

In short: The 2020 House investigation into Big Tech produced rare agreement across party lines that a handful of platforms hold monopoly power. The alliance split over remedies, and most of its bills stalled, but it reshaped how both parties talk about corporate power. Here's the argument that the shared ground is real, worth defending, and still the best route to rules that last.

A report written for the record

The investigation ran out of the Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law, chaired by Rhode Island Democrat David Cicilline. It was not a fishing trip. The subcommittee collected millions of pages of documents, interviewed competitors and former employees, and in July 2020 brought the four chief executives in for a hearing, by video link because of the pandemic. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai answered questions for hours.

The best material came from the companies' own files. Internal emails showed executives talking about buying rivals before they became threats, about using control of an app store or a marketplace to favour their own products, about the data that flowed to them because everyone else had to use their platforms. The report's argument was that each firm had become a gatekeeper. If you sell goods online, you more or less have to be on Amazon. If you build an iPhone app, you go through Apple's App Store on Apple's terms. If you want to be found on the web, Google decides where you stand. And if you built a social network that people liked, Facebook had a history of buying it.

The recommendations were ambitious. Structural separations, so that a company running a marketplace could not also compete inside it against the sellers who depend on it. A presumption against acquisitions by dominant platforms. Rules requiring the platforms to let users take their data elsewhere and let rival services connect. And, perhaps most important for the long run, a push to restore antitrust law's older concern with power itself, not only with what a company charges.

What the Colorado Republican actually said

Buck's response was published as a separate report, and it is worth reading slowly, because it marks out precisely where the common ground was and where it ended.

He agreed that the four companies held monopoly power. He agreed that the antitrust agencies needed more money and more willingness to bring cases. He agreed that some of the conduct the investigation documented was anticompetitive. He supported measures that made it easier for enforcers to challenge mergers and for states to bring cases in their own courts.

Where he parted company was on how far to go. He was wary of the structural separation proposals and of anything that looked like turning the Federal Trade Commission into a broad industry regulator. His instinct was to give the existing law sharper teeth rather than build a new regulatory apparatus around it. Several Republicans on the committee went further than he did in opposing the Democratic recommendations; others signed on to his more limited agreement.

Here is why that distinction matters. A great deal of political coverage treats agreement as all or nothing: either both sides endorse the whole package or there is no common ground at all. Buck's report showed something more useful, a map. On the diagnosis, a Democrat from Rhode Island and a Republican from Colorado agreed. On a defined set of remedies, they also agreed. On a larger set, they did not. A serious legislator works inside that map rather than pretending it is not there.

Why conservatives came around

For two generations, the conservative legal movement had shaped antitrust in a particular direction. The idea associated with Robert Bork's 1978 book "The Antitrust Paradox" held that the only legitimate goal of the law was consumer welfare, usually measured as low prices. A company that grew huge by being efficient was doing exactly what markets should reward. Courts took that view to heart, and the bar for proving a monopoly case rose for decades.

Big Tech scrambled that consensus in two ways.

The first was economic. Many of these services are free to the user, so a price-only test struggles to see harm at all. The harm shows up elsewhere: in what sellers pay to reach customers, in startups that never get funded because investors assume a giant will copy or buy them, in privacy given up because there is nowhere else to go.

The second was political, and it is the one conservatives talked about most. Many on the right came to believe that the major platforms moderated speech in ways that disfavoured them. Whatever one makes of that claim, and the evidence on it is contested, it gave conservatives a reason of their own to ask why a few companies should hold so much sway over public conversation. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote a book attacking the platforms' power. State attorneys general from both parties joined lawsuits against Google and Facebook.

Progressives had arrived by a different road: worry about workers, small businesses, local news and the concentration of wealth. The roads met. That is how coalitions usually form. People rarely agree for the same reasons; they agree on the same thing.

The bills that moved, and the ones that stalled

In June 2021, the House Judiciary Committee took up a package of six bills that grew out of the investigation. Each passed the committee, several with Republican votes. In the Senate, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, a Democrat and a Republican from neighbouring farm states, sponsored a version of the central bill, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which would have barred dominant platforms from rigging their own marketplaces to favour their own products. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved it in early 2022 with support from both parties.

Then it waited. It never got a vote on either floor. The companies spent heavily lobbying against it, warning that it would break popular features and weaken security. Some Democrats from California and elsewhere had doubts. Leadership in both chambers did not prioritize it. The window closed when the Congress ended.

Two smaller pieces did become law at the end of 2022, folded into the year-end spending package. One updated merger filing fees, lowering them for small deals and raising them for the largest, which gave the enforcement agencies more money. The other made it harder for big companies to drag state antitrust cases into a federal court of their choosing. Neither is the sort of thing that makes a cable news chyron. Both were exactly the kind of agreement Buck's report had sketched.

Where it went in the courts

Meanwhile, cases filed during the first Trump administration kept moving. The Justice Department sued Google in October 2020 over its search business, joined by state attorneys general. The Federal Trade Commission sued Facebook that December. These cases were begun under a Republican administration and carried on under a Democratic one, which is itself a kind of common ground that rarely gets noticed.

In August 2024, Judge Amit Mehta of the federal district court in Washington ruled that Google had illegally maintained a monopoly in search, in large part through the payments it made to be the default search engine on phones and browsers. The remedies he ordered in 2025 were narrower than the government had sought: he declined to make Google sell its Chrome browser, while barring exclusive default deals and requiring some sharing of data with rivals. A separate federal judge in Virginia ruled in 2025 that Google had monopolized parts of the advertising technology market.

There is a lesson here that cuts against easy cynicism. Courts can and do find that tech giants broke the law. They also tend to be cautious about remedies, especially breaking companies apart. That caution is one reason the 2020 report called for Congress to write clearer rules rather than wait for each case to wind through a decade of litigation.

The strongest case on the other side

Fairness requires laying out the argument against all this at full strength.

These companies built products people use because they are good. Search works. Packages arrive. Phones are secure in part because one company controls what runs on them. Breaking up integrated services could make them worse, and a regulator deciding which features are allowed could freeze an industry that has changed every few years. Technology markets have a history of dominant firms being toppled by new ones; the search giant of 1999 is not the search giant of today. And giving government agencies more power over companies that host speech carries its own risk, one that both parties should take seriously depending on who holds those agencies.

Those points are real. Here is the answer, in our view. The question is not whether the products are good; it is whether anyone else is allowed to try to build a better one on fair terms. A marketplace that is also a seller can bury the rivals who depend on it. A platform that can buy any rising competitor need never worry about being toppled. Clear rules written by Congress, applied evenly, are actually less arbitrary than an agency improvising case by case, and much less arbitrary than leaving four companies to set the rules themselves. As for agency power, the Supreme Court has now made that worry sharper: in Trump v. Slaughter in June 2026, it held that the protection keeping FTC commissioners from being fired without cause is unconstitutional. An enforcement agency whose members serve at the president's pleasure is one more reason to want the core rules written into statute rather than left to whoever runs the commission.

Where progressives made it harder

Progressives should own a share of the stall. Some of the rhetoric around the 2021 bills sounded like a crusade against particular companies rather than a set of rules for any dominant platform, which made it easier for opponents to paint the effort as punitive and easier for wavering members to stay away. And some in the coalition treated every Republican interest in tech power as bad faith, which left potential allies with nowhere to stand.

The lesson is not to soften the goal. It is to write for the coalition that exists. Rules that apply to any company above a size threshold, aimed at conduct anyone can recognize as unfair, such as self-preferencing, buying out rivals, and locking in users' data, are rules a farm-state Republican can defend at a town hall. That is exactly the coalition Klobuchar and Grassley assembled, and the one that came within sight of the Senate floor.

The people in the middle of it

It helps to remember who this is actually about. The third-party seller in Ohio who pays a growing share of every sale in fees and advertising to stay visible on a marketplace. The app developer in Austin who cannot tell customers there is a cheaper way to pay. The local newspaper that lost its advertising to two companies that also decide whether its stories are seen. The startup founder who is told by investors that there is no point building something that a giant could clone in a quarter.

These people do not sort neatly by party. Rural and urban, they share the experience of depending on a gatekeeper they cannot argue with. That, more than any theory of antitrust, is why a Democrat from Rhode Island and a Republican from Colorado could read the same documents and reach many of the same conclusions.

With Democratic majorities in both chambers due to be sworn in on January 3, 2027, the bills that stalled in 2022 have a fresh opening. Whether they move depends partly on whether their backers remember how close the cross-party version came.

What you can do

• Ask your members where they stand on the platform bills. Our representatives lookup gives you your House member's and senators' phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes. A short call asking whether they would co-sponsor rules against self-preferencing by dominant platforms is the kind of constituent contact staff actually log.
• Read the record of cross-party bills. Our page on bills both parties passed together is a good reminder that agreement is not rare when the subject is concrete, and a source of examples when someone tells you it never happens.
• Watch for rules that open for comment. When the FTC or another agency proposes a rule touching competition or data, it lands on the list of federal rules open for public comment, sorted by closing date, with guidance on writing a comment that counts.
• Follow the coverage. The Big Tech and AI topic page gathers reporting on platform power, the court cases and what Congress does next.
• Talk to a small-business owner you know. Ask how much of their revenue flows through one or two platforms. Their answer is the most persuasive argument for the cause, and it will not sound partisan to anyone.