A passionate, bipartisan legislative effort to rein in the nation’s biggest tech 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 dispatched trade groups and sympathetic researchers to repeal two antitrust bills co-sponsored by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat from Minnesota, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa’s. Companies treated the bills as an existential threat.
The years-long US legislative effort, which tapped into anger over the power and dominance of tech companies, would have hit the practices of Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Amazon.com Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. for the first time. and Apple Inc. time in the nearly three decades since the Internet was revealed to the public.
