(The Center Square) – New antitrust legislation introduced in the California Assembly seeks to curtail corporate activity that some lawmakers characterize as anti-competitive.
“The Compete Act is about providing competition and opportunity in markets, and it’s about creating a prosperous, equitable and transparent economy,” Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, D-Winters and author of the bill, said during a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “It’s about choices for consumers, power for workers, growth for small business, and it’s about markets built on merit, not power.”
Assembly Bill 1776 updates California law by building on the rules established by the Cartwright Act of 1907, Aguiar-Curry told reporters at the Capitol in Sacramento.
The Cartwright Act was passed long before the modern economy emerged, advocates for the Compete Act said Tuesday.
“Markets have changed,” Aguiar-Curry said during the press conference. “Industries have consolidated. When competition dries up, our families pay more; our small businesses struggle to compete. Our workers have fewer options and innovation slows down.”
A trust would be redefined under the Compete Act as a combination of capital, skill or acts by one person or more, thus expanding what is able to be prosecuted as a crime, according to the bill's text.
Currently state law defines antitrust activities as a combination of capital, skill or acts by two or more people. Ultimately, the Compete Act could have the effect of allowing more workers to unionize, as well as allowing for conditions that keep large corporations from overpowering the market and crowding out small businesses, supporters of the bill said.
Under current law, consolidation in various industries, like the grocery industry, create conditions that suppress competition, as well as undermine workers’ bargaining power and keep wages low, advocates said.
“Workers deserve to see their paychecks grow,” said Mark Ramos, president of United Food and Commercial Workers Western States Council and UFCW Local 1428, a union in Fairmont.
“They deserve to prosper, just as their employers have prospered," said Ramos, who stood with Aguiar-Curry during the news conference.
Examples of what some lawmakers called anti-competitive behavior in California include the proposed Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery merger, which the Golden State’s lawmakers questioned company officials about earlier this month, according to previous reporting by The Center Square. Netflix sought to buy Warner Bros. Discovery for $83 billion, combining their resources and streaming services. Congressional Republicans warned against what they characterized as anti-competitive behavior in recent months, saying that the merger would “raise serious competition questions” and that lawmakers should look at any corporate deal that would result in concentration in the streaming and entertainment market.
During Tuesday’s press conference, small business owners talked about large internet shopping platforms “scraping” their business websites, a practice that uses bots to visit websites and extract large amounts of data about products, price points and other information. That information, small business owners said, was used to recreate product listings to sell their own products on large e-retailer sites they weren’t listing their products on.
