By Emily Birnbaum, Bloomberg.
A passionate and bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the country’s largest technology companies collapsed this week, the victim of an epic lobbying campaign by Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.
The internet titans spent hundreds of millions of dollars, sent their chief executives to Washington and deployed trade groups and sympathetic scholars to quash two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican. The companies treated the bills like an existential threat.
The years-long legislative effort, which harnessed outrage over tech companies’ power and dominance, would have cracked down on the practices of Alphabet’s Google, Amazon.com, Meta Platforms and Apple for the first time in the nearly three decades since the internet was unveiled to the public.
