American small businesses have never had more ways to reach a customer. A small seller from the heartland who starts a business from their own home can now reach millions of consumers in an instant. That’s what happened for Alexis Austin, the Founder and CEO of Curio Press, a personalized stationery company whose revenue doubled almost overnight thanks to Amazon’s Handmade marketplace.
H.R. 9799, the Online Sellers’ Bill of Rights Act of 2026, describes a very different seller. Its findings say small businesses “depend on dominant online marketplaces” and face platform power “without sufficient transparency or due process.” Rep. Becca Balint (D-VT) introduced the bill on July 21 and it now sits with the House Judiciary Committee. It is backed by the Open Markets Institute, Public Citizen, and other groups that have argued for years that American antitrust law is too permissive. The trouble starts with that opening picture, because the seller in the findings does not look much like the people actually running these businesses.
Small Sellers Have Choices, and They Use Them
The Connected Commerce Council’s Small Sellers’ Big Choices research found that 70% of small online sellers use more than one sales method, and 77% mix online selling with traditional channels like brick-and-mortar and wholesale. Sellers who use online marketplaces use four of them on average. Eighty-five percent advertise on more than one platform. Ninety percent say they have plenty of options when it comes to fulfillment tools.
These are savvy operators who pick their channels based on which ones earn their business, and who move when a channel stops earning it. That is what competition looks like from the seller’s side of the counter. It is also the opposite of the dependence the bill’s findings assume, and that assumption is what the rest of the bill rests on. NetChoice has been telling this story for years through our Retail is Everywhere campaign, where sellers describe in their own words how they use online and offline channels together.
Slower Enforcement Means Riskier Shopping
Marketplaces suspend sellers and hold inventory because counterfeit and unsafe products are a constant problem. Amazon alone found and destroyed more than 15 million counterfeit products in 2025, and its Counterfeit Crimes Unit has gone after more than 32,000 bad actors in 14 countries since 2020. Catching fakes at that scale means acting on strong suspicion before an investigation wraps up.
H.R. 9799 makes that harder in three specific ways. Section 3 bars a platform from suspending a seller, holding inventory, or freezing funds “solely on the basis of suspicion,” and shifts the burden of proof on the platform. It requires held inventory to be returned to the seller after 30 days unless the platform can already prove its case, with no exception for an open law enforcement investigation. And it requires the platform to hand the seller under investigation the specific facts, reports, and documents behind the action, while specifying that “generic or templated responses shall not satisfy these requirements.”
Put those together, and a seller running a counterfeit operation gets a 30-day clock and a strong argument that the platform jumped the gun. The sellers who gain the most from a higher standard of proof are the ones enforcement teams are trying to remove. The disclosure rule carries a second cost that is easy to miss. The reports behind an enforcement action usually come from a brand owner who spotted the fake and reported it. Handing that file to the accused seller tells bad actors exactly who turned them in.
Marketplaces Already Do Most of What the Bill Asks For
A wrongful suspension is a real problem for a real business, and marketplaces know it. That is why they have built violation-specific explanations, appeals processes with published timelines, advance notice of policy changes, and account health dashboards that show sellers where they stand. Keeping sellers happy is good business, and marketplaces compete for sellers on exactly these terms.
H.R. 9799 would freeze those systems in place. Fixed 30-day windows and a statutory notice schedule replace processes that platforms update as scammers change tactics. The penalties make any update risky. Section 4 lets the FTC treat a violation as an unfair method of competition, lets any state attorney general sue on behalf of residents, and lets sellers sue on their own for triple damages and legal fees even if they signed an arbitration agreement. Now add a rule saying that form communications automatically fall short of the legal standard. Platforms have every reason to say less to sellers, because every automated notice becomes evidence in somebody’s lawsuit.
The Bill Reaches Well Beyond Online Marketplaces
The bill does not actually apply to online marketplaces. It applies to any “critical trading partner,” which Section 5 defines as any trading partner that can restrict or impede a business’s access to its customers or to a tool it needs to serve them. Any company that can enforce its own terms of service against a business customer fits that description. On its face, that includes:
- App stores that remove developers who break content rules
- Payment processors that freeze accounts over compliance concerns
- Ad platforms that reject creative or suspend advertiser accounts
- Software vendors that cut off access after a contract violation
None of these companies hold anyone’s inventory, and none of the complaints driving this bill came from them. The FTC would get 180 days to write rules around a definition broad enough to cover most of the commercial internet. The state attorneys general and plaintiffs’ lawyers in Section 4 would not need to wait for those rules to start testing the edges.
A Better Standard Already Exists
This is the same instinct behind the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which we wrote about in Importing Failure. Write a rulebook around the assumption that businesses are trapped, then hand it to regulators and trial lawyers. American antitrust law has a better tool for this. The consumer welfare standard asks one question about any business practice: do consumers end up better or worse off? Congress does not have to guess, because that test already does the work.
Small sellers are not asking for a rulebook. Ninety-four percent of them told the Connected Commerce Council they expect their business to grow over the next four years. Congress should protect the competition that produced that confidence, starting by rejecting a bill that would make it harder to stop the counterfeiters preying on honest sellers.
Image via Unsplash.