The U.S. Congress is restarting an antitrust legislative offensive that has the most significant impact on Apple in recent years, once again targeting the App Store and the control of large platforms over the ecosystem. This battle has been delayed and shelved in multiple Congresses due to strong lobbying by technology giants.
On June 10, U.S. Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-Minnesota) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA). This bill aims to restore bipartisan cooperation and restrict the behavior of dominant large technology platforms from "simplifying" their own products and services.
The bill targets the largest online platforms and attempts to restrict practices that supporters view as unfair competitive advantages, including favoring its own services in search rankings, recommendations and entry positions. Apple and other tech giants have spent years and money fighting earlier versions of the legislation, citing the impact it could have on their business models.
According to the current text, AICOA will prohibit dominant technology companies from giving preferential treatment to their own products and services on the platform. This practice, known as "self-preferencing", has been criticized as substantially suppressing the development space of third-party competitors. Critics have long accused Apple of controlling both the iOS operating system and the App Store distribution channel to "protect" its own services in application distribution, payment and subscription, which is not conducive to a fair competitive environment.
Apple has always emphasized that the primary goal of its platform policy is to protect user privacy, security and platform integrity. In a statement to the media, Apple expressed its firm opposition to the Senate's push for "EU-style regulation," believing that relevant legislation would weaken privacy protection and security standards, harm children's safety, and make it more difficult to do business in the United States.
Apple also criticized that copying Europe's "failed policies" to the United States would not really improve market competition. The "return" of this round of bills marks a new stage in a legislative attack and defense that has been going through several Congresses. An earlier version of AICOA successfully passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, a relatively rare advance among technology regulatory proposals, but it ultimately failed to reach a vote in the full chamber.
The debate surrounding AICOA has evolved since Congress first discussed it. On the one hand, Apple has adjusted some of the App Store rules in Europe in order to comply with the EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA). On the other hand, European practice provides a real-life example that allows the outside world to observe the specific impact of a strong regulatory framework on the operations of large platforms.
DMA requires large technology platforms to make important adjustments in the way they compete and operate. Although AICOA takes a different approach, the goal is to restrict platforms from using their own control to give preferential treatment to their own services. For Apple, the series of App Store changes triggered by the EU DMA just became a realistic reference for US lawmakers when they conceived AICOA.
Apple has repeatedly emphasized that AICOA will "mirror" the EU's Digital Market Act in key terms, and the DMA has forced the company to make significant adjustments to the App Store in the EU. According to Apple, the implementation of DMA weakens privacy protection, increases security risks, and makes new product launches and platform evolution more complex and difficult.
In previous rounds of legislative battles, Apple was one of the fiercest opponents, believing that certain provisions in the bill would make it more difficult to maintain platform privacy and security defenses. Industry groups representing major technology companies have also warned that regulations could have unintended side effects on products and services that are highly integrated with hardware and software.
Supporters of the bill insist that dominant platforms have too much control over the companies that rely on them to do business, and that existing antitrust laws are insufficient to address these structural problems. In order to prevent AICOA and related antitrust legislation from being implemented, companies such as Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta have collectively invested more than $100 million in lobbying and public relations initiatives in the past. Trade associations and industry-funded advertising campaigns were once overwhelming. However, despite bipartisan support and committee clearance, the bill was ultimately stalled.
The bill's "return" does not mean that it will be successfully passed into law, but its return itself shows that Congress is still trying to restrict large technology platforms from using their ecological control rights to preferential treatment of their own products and services. For Apple, this is not just another regulatory review, but a major issue about the future operating model of the App Store and how Apple's services business competes on its platform.
At this time, it remains unclear whether this version will gain enough support to move forward. However, what is certain is that the debate surrounding the power boundaries of large technology platforms will continue to extend the front line at the US legislative level, and Apple’s role and boundaries in the iPhone ecosystem will once again become the core issue in the spotlight.