Senate hearing spotlights bipartisan push for structural fixes to big tech ad and search dominance
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Summary
Senators and outside witnesses at the Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing debated structural remedies — including the America Act — and other tools to address alleged monopolistic conduct by major tech firms in search, advertising and app markets.
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights opened a hearing titled “Big Fixes, Big Tech,” pressing for legislative remedies to what witnesses and senators described as entrenched market power in online search, digital advertising and related platform services.
The hearing’s chair, Sen. Mike Lee, framed the day around structural remedies such as the America Act and said Congress must act: “Congress, of course, has the opportunity to pass solutions to unlock competition across tech platforms, ensuring that American consumers can and will benefit from competition.”
Why it matters: witnesses representing startups, publishers and public-interest groups told the panel that court victories and enforcement actions alone are slow to change market structure and that statutory fixes — including forced divestitures, open APIs and prohibitions on self-preferencing — are needed to restore competition and protect consumers, small businesses and publishers.
Boston University law professor Rory Van Loo urged structural change and defended the America Act as a blueprint for ad-tech reform. “These are invisible taxes that we all pay when competition falls short,” Van Loo testified, describing how search and ad marketplaces can raise prices for consumers and small businesses.
Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator, pressed the committee on how closed APIs and lack of interoperability block startups. He told senators that promising companies have pivoted or failed after being denied essential access: “Consumers get transformative technology years later than they otherwise could because entrenched monopolies consistently pull the ladder up behind them.”
Jason Kent, CEO of Digital Content Next, represented publishers’ concerns about ad-revenue capture by dominant intermediaries. “It is like they're the referee, the player, and the scoreboard operator all at the same time,” Kent said, summarizing the committee’s evidence that a single firm can control buying tools, selling tools and the exchange between them.
Morgan Harper of the American Economic Liberties Project urged more aggressive remedies, including structural separation and executive accountability. “Big tech firms have become too big to govern, and their power threatens our children, economy, and national security,” she testified, advocating breakups where necessary.
Camille Bosbaz, senior vice president for public affairs at DuckDuckGo, described search-market concentration and urged Congress to enable greater algorithmic choice and access to search indexes and ranking signals. DuckDuckGo’s testimony noted it holds about 2.5% mobile market share while, as witnesses repeatedly cited, Google’s share of general search exceeds 90%.
Panelists cited recent enforcement actions and pending cases as context: the Department of Justice’s long-running search and ad-tech suits against Google and the Federal Trade Commission’s case seeking to unwind prior social-media acquisitions were discussed as necessary but slow paths to relief, and witnesses urged congressional statutes that would create durable, marketwide rules.
Senators across party lines raised related issues. Members pressed witnesses on right-to-repair concerns (noting farmers’ difficulties repairing tractors under proprietary software restrictions), on how app-store rules and default settings cement defaults inside mobile ecosystems, and on whether stronger private enforcement or legislative changes could speed redress.
The committee did not vote on legislation at the hearing. Chairman Lee asked witnesses to answer written questions for the record and set deadlines for those filings.
The hearing record captures a clear bipartisan appetite on the subcommittee for statutory interventions that combine structural remedies (divestitures, separation of ad-tech functions), access mandates (open APIs and index access) and prohibitions on self-preferencing. Witnesses and senators differed on how far to go, but many urged Congress to move faster than courts can.
Written questions to witnesses may be submitted to the subcommittee through April 4; the chair asked witnesses to return answers by the following Monday, as recorded at the hearing’s close.
