A look at the US' bipartisan push to pass Big Tech antitrust bills in 2022, derailed by industry lobbying, ads, PR, donations, and congressional dysfunction
Steven Pearlstein / Washington Post : Twitter: @postopinions , @christinebannan , @mrmeador , and @sherman1890 Twitter: @postopinions : Congress has lost its ability to address the most pressing problems facing the country, Steven Pearlstein writes. “The prime suspect in this legislative murder mystery is Big Tech itself.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Christine Bannan / @christinebannan : “Cicilline and Buck were face to face with the paradox at the root of congressional dysfunction: On most issues, both parties prefer gridlock because both believe it reduces the risk of losing the next election.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Mark Meador / @mrmeador : This leaves out more than it reveals, trust me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @sherman1890 : A better alternative explanation: bad statutory design. Condemning conduct on the basis of firm size rather than product market power; applying harsh but vague rules to the fastest growing part of the economy. Antitrust needs improvements, but these were opportunities lost. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The legislative arc that ended in failure began promisingly: the House Judiciary Committee approved a 450-page report accusing Big Tech of buying and crushing smaller rivals that was explicitly framed as a blueprint for legislation, and a bipartisan pairing of Cicilline and Buck kept the bills alive through 2021 despite Republican infighting over whether the bills addressed alleged bias. By mid-2022 the self-preferencing bill was already stalling as Senate Democrats weighed midterm risk.
The endgame played out exactly as the money predicted: after Amazon and Meta set record lobbying years at $20.3M and $20.1M respectively in 2021, the White House made one final attempt to salvage the bills in a post-midterms lame-duck session — and it went nowhere. Pearlstein's autopsy treats the failure as a murder mystery with Big Tech as prime suspect, but the related reporting shows Congress itself preferred the gridlock both parties claim to fear.
First-order effects
- AICOA, the Open App Markets Act, and the other 2022 bills die unpassed, so Amazon, Apple, Google, and Meta face no statutory prohibition on favoring their own products — the status quo they lobbied for is preserved into the new Congress.
- Sponsors like Cicilline lose their best window: the lame duck was the last session where the bipartisan coalition existed, and the bills now restart from scratch under a reconstituted committee.
Second-order effects
- The record lobbying spend becomes a proven template: Amazon and Meta's ~$20M years demonstrably bought the outcome, so expect rivals facing future regulatory threats to scale up ads, PR, and donations rather than compromise.
- With the legislative route blocked, pressure shifts to executive-branch tools — DOJ and FTC enforcement, agency rulemaking — which the same lobbying apparatus will now target instead.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, meaningful constraint on Big Tech comes from courts, state attorneys general, and regulators rather than Congress, making enforcement personnel and appointments the new battleground where platform influence is contested.
- Gridlock-as-strategy hardens: when both parties conclude blocking is safer than passing, any industry that can fund a defense-in-depth of lobbying, ads, and donations acquires a durable veto over major legislation — a structural asymmetry Pearlstein argues is itself the dysfunction.
The trend: Platform regulation is migrating from Congress, where funded industries can force stalemate, toward courts and agencies whose capture costs are lower for incumbents than passing laws ever was.