Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley and Senator Amy Klobuchar reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) this past June, with Senators Dick Durbin, Josh Hawley, Sheldon Whitehouse, and Cory Booker signing on as cosponsors. The bill targets common business practices such as the so-called “self-preferencing,” which would ban platforms like Google or Amazon from favoring their own products, even though people often get better, faster, or cheaper results through these platforms’ integrated services. Congress has already rejected this bill twice, in 2022 and again in 2023. Lawmakers pointed to the cost small businesses would face and the risk to user privacy and data, both of which have only grown more urgent since. This regulatory experiment has not gone untested. A comparable law has been on the books in Europe for two years now, and it hasn’t gone well.
Small businesses would absorb the cost
One Iowa small business owner described what her business stands to lose. Her Google Business Profile surfaces reviews and a map to her location free of charge, but AICOA would force Google to give equal billing to lower-quality competitors, many of which charge for features Google offers free. Fulfillment by Amazon lets her offer fast, low-cost delivery without managing shipping herself, and losing it would mean slower service and higher costs for her and her customers. Her experience tracks with the broader data. Of the 30 percent of small businesses that sell on Amazon, 98 percent call its pricing fair and competitive, and one 2022 estimate put the potential cost of this kind of legislation to small and medium-sized businesses at $500 billion in lost sales over five years.
The bill’s own mandates create the privacy and security risk it purports to protect
Apple made this case the moment the bill came back, warning that opening the iOS ecosystem to outside app stores and alternative payment systems would undermine the privacy, security, and child safety protections people rely on every day. The company’s specific concern was access, not just competition. Forcing a platform to open up on demand means handing sensitive user data to any company that asks for it, whether or not that company has ever earned a user’s trust. Right now, a platform can say no to a bad actor before harm happens. Under AICOA, that changes. A platform that blocks a scammer or a malicious app risks punishment, while one that lets them through does not, leaving users to deal with the consequences.
Europe already tried this
Rather than relying on speculation, lawmakers can look directly to Europe, where a similar law has been in effect for three years. The EU’s Digital Markets Act has been in force since March 2024. It bans the same basic things AICOA would, once a platform crosses a certain size. And the fallout has been easy to track. To avoid aggressive regulatory penalties under the DMA, Google weakened anti-spam protections for European users. Citing complex interoperability mandates, Apple postponed key Siri features across the region. Even more concerning, a survey of 5,000 European consumers revealed that the majority now experience additional friction and extra steps during basic web searches. This is the track record of AICOA-like legislation.
The Senate Judiciary Committee has the record it needs
There’s nothing left to speculate about here. Small businesses have laid out the cost, Apple has laid out the risk, and Europe has lived through the consequences. The Senate Judiciary Committee doesn’t need to guess how this ends. It needs to protect American small businesses and consumers by rejecting AICOA a third time.