A shrinking handful of Senators reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) again this Congress. Opposition to the bill remains strong, and that’s a good thing. Five fewer Senators cosponsored the legislation upon introduction this time around, and there doesn’t appear to be a legitimate path forward for similar legislation in the House. But while the odds are long the bill will advance anytime soon, it is worth pointing out how it could affect devs and the app ecosystem.
As we have explained in detail, the bill effectively dismantles the app ecosystem that makes the third party app business model work. Among the many things this behemoth of a bill would do is ban platforms from giving preference to their own products (which is incredibly common offline); force platforms to be interoperable with other competing programs (which weakens security and harms innovation); and prohibit platforms from restricting access to data (opening up privacy risks). Collectively, these mandates would seriously disrupt the app ecosystem and are dangerous for the consumers depending on it.
The bill’s sponsors have worked hard to spin it as protecting small developers, but the bill fails to deliver on that promise. First, and most concerning, AICOA’s harmful effects would fall heaviest on small- and medium-sized job creators. That’s because it would carelessly dismantle the app ecosystem with nothing to replace it. The app ecosystem is one of the most important economic drivers in our economy. Just last year, consumers spent $167 billion on apps, downloading more than 255 billion of them! One estimate shows that more than 2.5 million Americans were working in the app economy in January 2022. Many of these jobs were in small- and medium-sized businesses. It’s against this backdrop that you have to wonder why anyone would want to disrupt this growth. Not even two decades ago, this industry didn’t even exist.
Next, the bill would give a leg up to our competitors abroad. While policymakers in Washington continue their misguided efforts to “break up Big Tech” (despite the fact that it will destroy small tech, too), competitors all around the world are anxious to fill the void and create the next great search engine, phone, or messaging platform. Make no mistake, this is a zero sum game. Whether allies or adversaries, countless governments around the world will be seeking to jumpstart their own innovation economies in our absence.
Finally, the bill would sow consumer chaos. Consumers rightly demand safe and secure products. AICOA would strangely require products to be interoperable with one another. It’s irrefutable that this is an existential threat to the end-to-end encryption that so many of us depend on to keep our health, financial, educational data, and so much more private. At a time when policymakers in Washington are (rightly) calling for devs to further strengthen the security of their products, they are also (wrongly) calling for companies to weaken their security so other companies can come in and access their goods. Any vulnerability – even those created in the name of fairness and competition – is a vulnerability that bad guys will exploit.
The bill didn’t have much success last Congress. Enough lawmakers harbored concerns that it never came up for a floor vote in either the House of Representatives or Senate. We remain hopeful that it experiences a similar fate in this Congress. Frankly, the future of the app ecosystem is at risk. There are too many unresolved issues for the bill to be passed in Congress and signed into law. This bill would drive a stake through the heart of job creation, threaten national security, and greatly weaken consumer protection. Congress should turn its attention to more pressing matters.
