ITIF - The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation

03/18/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 03/18/2026 15:02

BASED Act Imports EU-Style Regulation to Attack California’s Leading Firms, Says ITIF

WASHINGTON- Following California State Sen. Scott Wiener's announcement at a conference hosted by Y Combinator of sweeping new antitrust legislation that would broadly ban large technology companies from engaging in so-called "self-preferencing" and related practices, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) released the following statement from Joseph V. Coniglio, ITIF's senior counsel and director of antitrust and innovation policy:

There is no market failure to which this proposal is responding. California's digital markets, which have led the world in innovation over the past several decades, continue to flourish, as evidenced by the rapid development by leading California firms of the next generation of general-purpose technology-artificial intelligence.What's more, California is already engaged in a process to amend its existing antitrust regime to better police single-firm conduct. Rather than allow that process to play out and determine whether any reforms are sufficient to address concerns about anticompetitive behavior, this proposal would rush into heavy-handed regulation modeled after the European Union's Digital Markets Act (DMA).Like the DMA's ban on self-preferencing, which has already had demonstrably negative effects on consumers and small businesses, the legislation will not benefit competition in California. Integrating and using data across services are ubiquitous practices in the modern digital economy that are overwhelmingly procompetitive and only in rare cases raise cognizable antitrust concerns.Unfortunately, rather than serve the public interest, the proposed legislation appears to be a textbook example of capture by commercial interests that are hostile to America's leading technology companies, which appear to be the sole targets of the bill-including the very firms that have been critical to making California the world leader in innovation it is today.That capture has another clear beneficiary: China, which is committed to ensuring that its state-backed firms lead innovation in the 21st century as part of a broader strategy to dethrone the West from global leadership.

Contact: Sydney Mack, [email protected]

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