WASHINGTON – Competitiveness Coalition Chairman Ronna McDaniel joined a policy discussion on the dangerous, anti-innovation American Innovation and Choice Online Act hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), one of the Coalition’s newest members. Other members of the powerhouse panel included ITIF’s Joe Coniglio, Graham DuFault of the Association for Competitive Technology, and the Progressive Policy Institute’s Diana Moss. The panel was moderated by ITIF’s Jack Nicastro.
During the discussion, McDaniel warned of the bill’s effect on consumers and American competitiveness on the global stage: “[AICOA is] obviously government overreach. It will end up costing consumers more, it will hurt startups, it will hurt innovation, but there is also a broader issue, which is the AI race with China. We are on this frontier with China, and this will slow us down while they’re charging ahead. There’s already a UK survey…that said China is already eclipsing us on the AI race, and this would just take us back further. And if you think about it, the CCP in China, they’re subsidizing their companies, like Alibaba. They’re making sure that they are innovating and pushing forward in the AI space.”
Other highlights included:
- DuFault highlighted AICOA’s similarities to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act: “…this is exactly what the EU’s Digital Markets Act does.”
- Coniglio pointed out how the legislation would effectively change the definition of unlawful conduct to ensure that more of our innovators are caught in the dragnet of unnecessary antitrust enforcement: “AICOA…puts the initial burden on the [companies] for most of these [lawful] practices to show that it is not harming competition, right, which is different from the Sherman Act.”
- Moss discussed the difficulties that antitrust enforcers would have in incorporating AICOA into their other enforcement activities: “How would the enforcement of AICOA interface with, interact with, conflict with, align with the enforcement of the generalist antitrust laws? [That] is something that the drafters of the legislation did not seem to think about or or consider.”
Watch the full panel featuring Chairman Ronna McDaniel here.
For more information on the Competitiveness Coalition’s work, please visit competitivenesscoalition.com. Members of the press can contact the coalition at press@competitivenesscoalition.com.
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The Competitiveness Coalition is a first-of-its-kind group educating the public and advocating for policies that put consumers first while fostering innovation and attracting new investment.