# The Bust Up Big Tech Act

This bill is designed to break up the largest technology companies by preventing them from owning multiple types of businesses at the same time. Right now, companies like Amazon, Google, Meta, and Apple operate in several different markets—for example, Amazon sells products directly to consumers while also running the marketplace where other sellers operate, and Google both provides search services and sells advertising. The Bust Up Big Tech Act would force these companies to choose: they'd have to separate their different business lines into independent companies that don't own each other.

The practical effect is that these tech giants would need to divest, or sell off, major parts of their operations. Amazon might have to separate its retail business from its cloud computing division (AWS) or its marketplace platform. Google would need to split its search engine from its advertising business. Apple might have to separate its app store from its hardware sales. The idea behind this is that when one company controls multiple parts of a market, it can unfairly favor its own services over competitors—like when Amazon can see what products are selling well on its marketplace and then creates its own competing products with that insider information.

This would mainly affect the companies themselves and their shareholders, but it could also impact everyday users. On one hand, breaking up these companies might increase competition, potentially leading to better services and lower prices. On the other hand, some services you currently use might become more expensive or less integrated if they're no longer owned by the same parent company. For instance, if you use multiple Google services, they might not work together as seamlessly if Google is broken into separate companies. The bill represents a major shift in how the government regulates big technology companies, moving from monitoring their behavior to fundamentally restructuring how they operate.

Bust Up Big Tech Act

Hawley, Josh

Bust Up Big Tech Act This bill prohibits large online platforms in the business of offering search engines, marketplaces, or exchanges from selling, advertising, or otherwise promoting their own goods and services on their websites. The bill also prohibits such online platforms from providing online hosting services or back-end online services to any other entity that is not owned by the platform. Such platforms are those with more than $1.5 billion in global revenue during the most recent tax year and over 30 million U.S. users or 300 million worldwide users