The first step toward meaningful antitrust reform

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

Help us spread the word about YOU.COM. Join our community on Discord, Tweet a review, or share your search experience with a friend. You can also add our privacy-preserving Chrome extension.