The first step toward meaningful antitrust reform
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The first significant tech antitrust bill is heading to the floor of the U.S. Senate, marking an important step in curbing Big Tech’s anti-competitive behavior.
On Thursday, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee approved the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), in a 16–6 bipartisan vote despite Big Tech lobbying against it.
The antitrust bill aims to prevent Big Tech from “favoring their own products or services” and to crack down on “self-preferencing.”
You.com joined 40 other small and medium-sized tech companies supporting the bill.
We’ve seen the ways that self-preferencing tactics undermine competition and consumer choice. For example, many of our you.com users who’ve made You.com their default search engine via our privacy-preserving Chrome extension have encountered manipulative design tactics to steer them back to Google Search. And we’re not alone.
Right now, a single gatekeeper controls nearly 90% of the search market. It also keeps the bulk of search traffic to itself — nearly 65% of searches worldwide (on desktop and mobile combined) in the fourth quarter of 2020 were “zero-click,” ending without that traffic going to another website, according to a study by SimilarWeb. This last point is especially problematic as the entire economy moves online.
Now is a critical time to foster healthy competition in the digital economy, especially in search. It’s one of the many reasons why we started You.com, a private search engine that summarizes the web and gives users real agency over their information diet through preferred sources while offering best-in-class privacy.
Thank you for your support.
Many wishes,
Richard Socher
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