The relentless effort to revive the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) is a dangerous influence for domestic tech policy. Rather than protecting consumers, this legislation moves away from the time-tested consumer welfare standard to shelter underperforming competitors. Worse yet, it seeks to anchor American economic strategy to a broken foreign framework at a critical historical juncture, effectively choosing the worst possible moment to compromise domestic digital platforms.
Perhaps the most instructive thing about AICOA is where its sponsors found their inspiration: Brussels. Its principal author has been consistently vocal in praising the EU’s Digital Markets Act as a model worth emulating in the United States. The foundational 2020 House report even boasted about reaching conclusions similar to European regulators, as if alignment with EU competition theory should be something an American lawmaker brags about.
But the DMA’s results are already in. Europe’s approach has saddled American companies with ruinous compliance burdens, produced arbitrary enforcement that companies cannot satisfy no matter how many accommodations they make, and degraded consumer experiences across the continent. The EU’s internet is less integrated and less useful than before the law took effect. Europe’s tech investment and broader economic performance reflect it. The White House has rightly called the DMA extortion of American companies. AICOA is the domestic version of the same playbook.
Adopting AICOA would pull the rug out from under the administration’s own efforts to push back on EU overreach—it’s impossible to credibly challenge discriminatory foreign regulations while simultaneously implementing the same framework at home.
The timing of AICOA’s latest reintroduction couldn’t be worse. We are in the middle of the most consequential AI competition in history, and the primary rival is China. This is not the moment to legislate confusion into the product strategies of the American companies investing billions to win that race.
As we’ve written before, the EU’s DMA primarily targets American companies while leaving Chinese competitors largely untouched. AICOA would replicate that same asymmetry here. The tragedy of American robotics company iRobot—blocked from a merger with Amazon by European regulators, only to be sold for parts to a Chinese firm—is the clearest illustration of what happens when anti-American regulatory theory meets a cutting-edge sector at a critical moment.
American companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta are making the enormous investments required to compete in and win the AI era. AICOA would impose legal jeopardy on the product decisions that make those investments worthwhile, while handing a structural advantage to state-backed Chinese competitors who face no equivalent constraint.
NetChoice has been consistent on AICOA: it was badly drafted when it was first introduced, it has lost ground in Congress every time it has been reintroduced, and none of its fundamental problems have been fixed across multiple rounds of reintroduction.
America does not need innovation-killing red tape imported from a European model that has already made the internet worse. It needs to let its tech sector lead. Congress must reject it again, and this time, make it final.
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