Utah Senator Mike Lee on Wednesday touted his proposed bill to
break up the ad businesses of Google and Meta, saying the measure would mark the first step toward “reining in the power and predation" of large tech companies.
The proposed Advertising
Middlemen Endangering Rigorous Internet Competition Accountability (AMERICA) Act would bring “transparency and competition” into the digital advertising market, the Republican lawmaker
said at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing.
The bill, similar to last year's proposed Competition and Transparency in Digital Advertising Act, would prohibit
ad exchange owners with more than $20 billion in ad transactions from owning supply-side platforms or demand-side platforms.
The proposed law also would prohibit the biggest supply-side
platform owners from owning demand-side platforms, and vice versa.
Digital ad companies that process more than $5 billion in digital ad transactions would be required to act in their
customers' best interests, provide transparency, and prevent conflicts of interest.
“We worry about large trillion dollar corporations that control our phones, our watches ... even baby
monitors, fitness routines,” Lee said at the hearing. “All of this technological and financial hegemony rests on one thing -- digital advertising, because digital ads are how you turn data
into money.”
Lee's office said when the bill was introduced that it would “most likely require Google and Facebook to divest significant portions of their advertising
businesses,” and could affect Amazon, Apple and other companies.
Interactive Advertising Bureau executive vice president for public policy Lartease Tiffith blasted the proposed law,
stating that it “has the potential to destroy one of the most powerful growth engines of the economy -- digital advertising and media.”
The bill “will also hurt the millions
of small businesses that rely on digital advertising to thrive, by creating a more inefficient, costly and fragmented advertising ecosystem,” Tiffith added.