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Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. KLOBUCHAR. Mr. President, I rise today to address my colleagues on the topic of competition policy, just as I did last week, and I will continue to do until we take action.

Now, I want to start out speaking briefly about one part of competition policy that is very important, and that has to do with prescription drugs.

As we all know, brand-name prescription drugs in the U.S. are more than 250 percent of those in other industrialized countries. In many cases, Americans pay the highest prices in the world for these drugs. Yet it is our country, our taxpayers, that have put in the money for the research.

The high price of prescription drugs has put treatments out of reach for many Americans, even those with insurance, and driven up the tab for taxpayers.

Examples: One of my constituents, Ramae, from Bemidji, was diagnosed in 2018 with an incurable blood cancer, multiple myeloma. She relies on a drug called Revlimid that costs about 15,000 a year. Ramae depleted her life savings, cashed out her 401(k), and sold her house in order to afford this drug she needs to survive.

Actually, nearly 20 percent of older adults have reported not taking their medicines as prescribed because of the cost.

The good news--and this gets to competition. Years and years ago, as you know, Mr. President, the pharmaceutical industry installed in law a provision that said Medicare was banned from negotiating less expensive prices for drugs--banned from negotiating.

Yet, we know from the VA, which is allowed to negotiate on behalf of our Nation's patriotic veterans, that we can get much less expensive but as high quality drugs for our veterans. Our 46 million seniors deserve the same kind of deal.

That is what we are coming into in this next week, finally. And I have led the bill that has over 30 cosponsors in the Senate to allow for negotiation of prescription drugs for a long, long time. Finally, we are going to get this done.

It is not going to cover all the drugs as I would, but it is a big beginning. We have enough votes in the Senate to pass a bill to fix that. Democratic votes--all Democratic votes. But it is the fight worth fighting. You see the Pharma ads running against this bill. They have got every incentive to stop this. Why?

Well, it is going to save taxpayers 288 billion over 10 years. Taxpayers are going to be able to get that money, instead of the prescription drug companies. That is why this is so important. It is going to allow Medicare to finally negotiate prices under Medicare Part D.

In addition to that, it will stop drug companies from price gouging drugs that are already on the market, stop price hikes, and make sure the price of your drugs doesn't increase more than the rate of inflation.

As I said, we have the votes in the Senate--all Democratic votes--to make life easier for so many people. We stand with AARP. We stand with the seniors of this country to finally allow Medicare to negotiate less expensive drugs for our seniors.

So that is one part of competition policy. That means allowing negotiation. That is part of what competition is. But there is something else we need to do, and last week I talked about what is happening with the tech companies. I talked about the fact that for years and years, in the beginning of this Nation's inception, our country has always believed in capitalism and in a free market, and we have always understood that you have got to have antitrust laws in place, which I explained the history last week. Antitrust laws, at the time, it got that name because it was about breaking up trusts. Trusts--steel trusts, copper trusts--trusts that controlled the economy, brought up prices, made it hard for individual small businesses to compete.

And over time, this Senate, this Chamber right here, the Senators-- they finally stopped just doing everything these trusts want. They stopped just giving in to the Big Money, and they actually did something to protect capitalism. That is when they passed the Sherman Act. Senator Sherman was a Republican from Ohio. They passed the Clayton Act. Through history, rose to the occasion.

We are at another moment in history right now, and that is a moment focused on too much consolidation in our economy. What is at stake is the very idea that drives our economy forward--competitive markets.

Today, too many areas of our economy are highly concentrated and controlled by a few corporations. These are the corporations of old. These are the trusts of old, but we have our modern-day ones as well.

So when this happens, you have a lot of problems, and one of them is corporations stop competitors from moving ahead and from innovating and finding better ways to serve customers because they have all the customers, so they don't have the incentive.

We have seen consolidation in everything from cat food to caskets. Our digital markets are now controlled by a few Big Tech titans that have grown into the largest corporations the world has ever known.

It is well past time to put some rules of the road in place to make sure that these dominant digital platforms work for consumers and allow American small businesses to innovate and compete.

That is why I have been working across the aisle with Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican lead of this bill, and a bipartisan group of Senators that Samantha Bee once called an ``Oceans 11 of cosponsors,'' including Senators Dick Durbin, Lindsey Graham, Richard Blumenthal, John Kennedy, Cory Booker, Cynthia Lummis, Mazie Hirono, Mark Warner, Josh Hawley, Steve Daines, and Sheldon Whitehouse--are all cosponsors of this bill. There are many, many other Senators who are going to support it as well.

It is why, as the chair of the Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, I have held a series of hearings with Senator Lee about online markets and abuses of power by the largest digital platform. Senator Lee and I have a number of other bills together on this subject.

We have heard about how the small number of extraordinarily large digital platforms--based on the 18 months of House hearings--18 months of House hearings--still, we have passed nothing in this Congress, not one bill since the dawn of the internet involving internet competition and competition policy.

What we have learned is they act as gatekeepers that control how smaller companies reach their customers. As a result, online marketplaces lack the hallmarks of robust competition, fierce price competition, game-changing new products, and customers switching back and forth among products.

Instead, we have what started as exciting when everyone started accessing Amazon, Google; but the market is becoming increasingly calcified, one where the biggest gatekeepers have little or even no fear of competitive threats, one where they feel no pressure, where they can put themselves at the top of the search results regardless of quality or price. That is what we have right now--no rules in place.

So when you look at Amazon, you see all these Amazon products at the top. You look at Google when this all started out, they didn't have their own products. Well, now they do--Google products at the top. Apple products at the top.

They can extract monopoly profits from consumers, and the small businesses rely on them because there is really no other way to access their own market.

If we don't act now, we will entrench those companies further, making it even more difficult for innovators to bring new products to market and for small and medium-size companies across America to grow online.

Let me be clear. We have monopoly problems that go far beyond digital giants like Facebook and Google, and there is more that we need to do to restore competition to markets throughout the economy. We have a big task in front of us to rein in unchecked power and bring the benefits of consumer competition to all.

Last Tuesday, I talked about the cost of inaction, how other countries are attacking this problem way before us, how the European Parliament has just passed a major bill that is much more aggressive than anything that we are looking at here.

Great Britain, what they are doing. Australia, what they just did. There are many examples throughout history, of course, where Congress stepped in and didn't bow to the bloated monopolies but actually did something to further competition and rejuvenate the competitive market.

When I talk about the dominant digital platforms, I am talking about some of the most powerful companies in the world, with armies of lobbyists and lawyers, with thousands of lawyers and lobbyists. They are everywhere--in every corner of this town, at every cocktail party, and all over this building. I tell my colleagues that they don't even know, sometimes, when someone is trying to influence them because they think they are just talking to a friend because they have hired everyone they can see.

But once they start talking about antitrust and Big Tech, I tell them they should at least ask the person if they are being paid by the tech company or if they are on one of the boards of one of the groups that supports the tech companies because, time and time again, they have been surprised to find the answer is yes.

The tech companies aren't just lobbying my colleagues; they are also lobbying the American people with ``astroturf'' campaigning and dishonest PR tactics. At the same time that I have been working with my colleagues in good faith on commonsense solutions to our online competition problems, these companies have been telling anyone who will listen that acting to protect competition in our digital markets will somehow cede our national security or outlaw Amazon Prime--something for which Senator Grassley and I came to the floor of the Senate because it was such a lie. Together, we noted that their own lobbyists had said that it wasn't true. Their own lobbyists for Google had said, Yes, the bill wouldn't really get rid of Amazon Prime. But that is what they are running ads for.

Then, of course, is the money. I think this is actually the best evidence of just how big and dominant and bullying these companies are, running ads in the States where people are in tough races. That is what they are doing. How obvious can it be? Message received: We are out here. We can hurt you. We may not be putting your name in these ads right now, but we can do it. We have got the money to do it because we are the dominant monopolies.

By the way, they wouldn't be spending millions and millions and millions of dollars to stop us if we didn't have some momentum. Let me give you some numbers.

In 2021, Big Tech companies spent more than $70 million combined lobbying Congress.

In the first quarter of this year, Facebook--now known as Meta-- Amazon, Alphabet--which is Google--and Apple spent more than $16 million lobbying Congress.

In just 1 recent week in May--1 week--one industry group, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, spent $22 million in 1 week on TV ads against this bill. That is $22 million against one bill in 1 week, and the numbers keep getting worse.

Since I last took to the floor to discuss this issue, it was reported that Amazon reached an alltime high in lobbying spending in the last quarter, and that is only what the company spent directly. It doesn't include what Big Tech directed others to spend, using contributions to spread misinformation about the bill.

So that is what we are up against. And there is me, and there is this poster. There is our lawyer--one lawyer, Keagan. We have another lawyer, Avery. We have a third person. That is it. That is our team. Of course, Senator Grassley and the other Senators involved in this have great attorneys. We have the endorsement of the Justice Department. That is a whole lot of lawyers. We have support from Secretary Raimondo over in Commerce and their team in doing this bill because they get that this is about competition moving forward.

I would like to share two examples of the misinformation campaign against this bill.

Just a few months ago, you may have read a letter from people outside of the Senate who were criticizing the bipartisan bill that Senator Grassley and I had worked on. It was signed on by a little-known group--actually, it was not that little-known if you watch TV because it is in the disclaimers on the ads--called American Edge. Here is what the Washington Post wrote about American Edge:

Backed by millions from Facebook-parent company Meta, American Edge has launched a full-throated campaign to combat antitrust legislation in Washington, placing op-eds in regional papers throughout the country, commissioning studies, and collaborating with a surprising array of partners, including minority business associations, conservative think tanks, and former national security officials.

This is The Washington Post talking.

It's a political playbook more common to other industries, including pharmaceuticals [and] tobacco. . . .

This is the playbook we have seen time and time again: Distort the truth, and distract people from the key issues by raising sideline potential concerns that aren't even in the bill's scope. Look over here, not at the real problems we face with real solutions to address them.

Amazon tried something similar, but they didn't get away with it because small business owners are too savvy to fall for silly tricks. As CNBC wrote in an article last month, Amazon is so worried that Congress will finally do something, not to get rid of Amazon and not to stop Amazon Prime, but to simply say, when you do your searches on Amazon, at least you should have a fair shake at getting whatever are the most affordable or best products in what you are looking for at the top and not just what Amazon wants you to see because that is what they own.

They placed a senior executive in charge, we now know, to recruit third-party sellers to oppose the bill, the small businesses. The Amazon executive posted to a forum used by sellers and directed them to a website that included a form to contact their Senators with a prewritten email opposing the legislation. But get this: They weren't fooled. These sellers knew the power that Amazon had to affect their businesses. They are monopolies, right? According to the CNBC report, hundreds of sellers replied to the post and actually expressed their support for the legislation.

I am not sure this would have happened 10 years ago, honestly, but now they have realized what the game is, what the rig is, what is really happening. Here are some examples of what the small businesses posted. This is after the request from the Amazon executive to write letters to people like me and the Presiding Officer opposing the bill.

Here is what someone wrote:

Any informed seller is going to support massive action taken against Amazon in the antitrust arena. I am personally sick of the condescending posts by Amazon management directed at us. We are not morons and know how to read and think for ourselves.

That one got more than 100 likes in the forum.

Here is another one:

Yes, I'm going to oppose that Amazon will be prohibited from undercutting, manipulating the Buy Box, and instituting restrictions on certain listings that unfairly bar me from selling an item. Yup, writing to my senator right now.

We will call that a sarcastic post.

Others got straight to the point:

Thanks for the reminder!

One seller wrote:

I've asked my senators to support the bill.

Another wrote:

If Amazon is against the Bill, it must be good!

And my favorite:

I'm highly allergic to corporate propaganda and fear mongering. Therefore, for the sake of my health, I will be encouraging my senators to fully support this legislation.

I think these are pretty good examples of how resilient and clever our American small businesses actually are.

Since I am a Senator and not a tech-based industry group, I don't get to spread my message with a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, but Big Tech lobbyists can't stop me from standing here right now on the Senate floor and telling you the truth--the people who are watching at home-- since there are actually no other Senators out here right now except the Presiding Officer.

We cannot let these companies use their monopoly profits to scare the Congress from doing its job. Some have said that this is the biggest political fight that Big Tech has ever fought. The truth is that they are not fighting on terms that anyone would think are fair. They are not fighting with truthful representations or factually grounded arguments. They are spending millions and millions of dollars on ads that distort the truth because they are scared. They are scared about what is going to happen if we have honest, robust, American style competition.

``It's better to buy than compete.'' ``It's better to buy than compete.'' Do you know who said those words? That is what Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2008 email around the time of the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions. Facing competition from new upstarts, Facebook decided to take them out--to stop them from innovating in ways that might win over users from Facebook. It makes sense, right? Who knows what Instagram would have developed for their bells and whistles in terms of privacy and other things if they had been able to fairly compete?

When the FTC sued Facebook, it wrote on--by the way, that was under the Trump administration and now continues on through the Biden administration. It wrote on page one of its antitrust complaint:

Facebook has maintained its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire.

As another Facebook employee wrote, quoted in the FTC's complaint:

We're scared that we can't compete on our own merits.

As of last week, we have new evidence showing the same from other companies from documents that were obtained by Chairman David Cicilline and Ranking Member Ken Buck, over in the House, during their bipartisan investigation into Big Tech.

One of the documents quotes an Amazon executive discussing the potential threat from Ring, a video doorbell company it later bought for $1 billion.

The executive said:

I'm supportive of Ring. I don't know how we can get big fast without acquiring someone.

In the same email chain from another Amazon executive:

There's a lot of overlap with what we want to do . . . and very little that we don't want to do.

There it is in black and white. They wanted to enter the market, but they couldn't innovate fast enough, so they just bought up the competition. That is what they have been doing. The dominant platforms will stop at nothing to protect their profits, even if it means stifling the innovation and ingenuity that has made our Nation's economy second to none. We see the campaign to try to torpedo this bill for what it is: an obvious effort to protect their market power and monopoly profits.

Adam Smith--the godfather of capitalism, the guy who talked about the invisible hand--loved capitalism, but he always said this:

Always watch out for the standing army of monopolies.

And that is why, over time, we have developed law that allows us to ensure that the big guys don't always control the marketplace--so that you can have new forms of competition developed.

I want to be clear on this point. These are highly successful companies that have given us incredible innovations. I don't want these companies or their innovations or their beneficial products or services they offer to go away, and they won't go away with this bill. What we will do is make sure that they are creating the conditions on their dominant platforms--because that is what we are dealing with, four different ones--for the next new thing to be developed and to thrive. That is why we have antitrust laws.

As Senator Sherman--a Republican from Ohio and for whom our central antitrust law, the Sherman Act, was named--famously said:

If we will not endure a king as a political power, we should not endure a king over production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life.

Let me speak specifically about antitrust and innovation. There is a persistent myth out there that antitrust law is about prices and nothing else. That is not true. Although prices are, of course, an extraordinarily important component of competition policy and analysis--and by the way, you are seeing more and more small businesses so concerned about what is going on--and big businesses because these platforms are charging them more and more and more just for the pleasure of being on the platform or for getting their names up at the top or for using their services, but it isn't all about pricing; it is also about innovation.

Through competition and innovation, there are new products, services, apps, and ideas that are hard for us to even fathom that will be developed by clever engineers, smart business people, and thoughtful marketers. Innovation is part of the American spirit. Innovation generates new opportunities and new hopes for businesses. Breakthroughs in science and technology have given us the vaccines that are getting us through this pandemic and driving the development of clean energy solutions. Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence are driving innovation across our country.

I think the Presiding Officer from the great State of Michigan knows a little bit about innovation there with what we have seen as its emergent. When everyone was writing off the American car companies, they innovated and moved ahead.

Of course, some of our economy's largest companies began as startups with new innovation, and some of these companies--now small and large-- are starting to say: Wait a minute. These four Big Tech companies can buy anything they want. There are no rules of the road. They can put their stuff at the top. Yet this is where customers go and buy things. We just need an even playing field in the marketplace.

Innovation that is vital to our American economy cannot thrive without open, competitive markets. It is competition that pressures manufacturers to invest in research and development and to constantly innovate to improve their products and introduce new products. It is competition that provides opportunities for entrepreneurs to develop new ideas and to start new businesses.

This topic is so important that I held a hearing with Senator Lee last December on innovation. In his opening remarks, Senator Lee shared his thoughts about this important topic, noting that when competition suffers, so does innovation. One might say that competition is itself the mother of innovation. Competition really can't occur without a lot of innovation.

As one of our witnesses at the hearing, Dr. Diana Moss, president of the American Antitrust Institute, testified, dominant firms face fewer economic incentives to innovate. It is one thing to create new products that can win over customers from a rival. It is another to create new products that might undermine your existing business.

When you have got all of the customers, let's say, in the App Store-- all Apple phones have one kind of app, and all other phones have another kind of app, Google--they are a duopoly. There you go. So they can do what they want. That is why they are charging 30 percent to Spotify--just for the pleasure of competing against Apple Music. That is what is happening.

The path to future innovations is through the crucible of competition. What makes companies innovate is not just a desire to please their customers but also the healthy fear that others might please them instead and win customers in the competitive landscape.

If the largest digital gatekeepers do not face any meaningful competition, they will continue to extract monopoly profits from customers and the small businesses that depend on them to reach their customers. If the largest digital gatekeepers have the power to avoid competition, we should expect that they will not innovate at the same pace as when they face stiff competition.

So to my colleagues I say, as I did last week: Yes, you can love the products. You can love the CEOs, if you want. You can love the companies. But you also have to love competition and understand the unique place of the U.S. Senate to take on what has happened time and time again in history: the bloated monopolies that sometimes come up. You don't get rid of steel or copper. Of course, we didn't. We created a more competitive marketplace.

That former chairman of AT&T said himself, after the breakup of AT&T, when we saw long distance rates go down through Democratic and Republican leadership, when we saw the cell phone industry, which had been nothing, when cell phones were the weight of bricks and this big in your briefcase--we saw all that changed, and he actually said we are a stronger company because of what happened.

Here are the facts today. Here are our new bloated situations: Google--pretend that is now Google--has a 90-percent market share in search engines. In Australia, when the Australian Government was taking them on and said you have got to charge a fair rate for media links, Google--and Facebook, by the way--literally said: OK, we are going to leave your country. We are going to leave an industrialized nation.

Then, there was so much pressure on the world that they backed down and negotiated rates.

A 90-percent market share--that is what you get to do. Great product, OK. If we are going to tolerate that, I guess the Justice Department will look at it.

That is not what our bill does. It doesn't break them up. It doesn't do anything. It is just that when we have a 90-percent gatekeeper, at least we have some rules of the road for what they put on there.

Apple controls 100 percent of app distribution for iPhones. Together, Apple and Google, as I noted, have a duopoly on app distribution on all smartphones. Three out of every four social media users--there are 4 billion of them--are active Facebook users. Amazon is expected to seize half of the entire e-commerce retail market this year.

What do they do with that power? As the New York Times reported a few years ago, back in 2018, if you opened up the App Store on an iPhone in May of 2018 and typed the word ``podcast'' in the search box, the first result, after an ad, would have been an app made by Apple: Apple Podcasts. The next result would have been Apple's Compass app, then Apple's Find My Friends app.

Amazon does the same thing.

ProPublica reported:

We looked at 250 frequently purchased products over several weeks to see which ones were selected for the most prominent placement on Amazon's virtual shelves--the so-called ``buy box'' that pops up first. . . .

And so many of us have had that experience, right? You are in a hurry. You want to buy something. What pops up first?

About three-quarters of the time, Amazon placed its own products and those of companies that pay for its services in that position, even when there were substantially cheaper offers available from others.

This obviously puts small businesses in a bind. The need for action is clear. All they have to do is treat people fairly, have a reason to put people up first, and treat the people who are advertising on their sites fairly.

The way our bill works, if they do that, they stay out of trouble. If they don't do it, the Justice Department, the FTC, and the State AG can look into doing something about it. They are, obviously, not going to bring some big case over one mistake. We are talking about a consistent effort here, which is exactly what they have been doing to make more money by putting their stuff at the top.

Since the founding of this country, people across the country and across the political spectrum have recognized and taken on the issue of monopoly power. That is why we have worked across the aisle--Senator Grassley and myself--to build bipartisan support for this bill, the bipartisan solution to the problem of anti-competitive self- preferencing by dominant digital gatekeepers. That is how we found our common ground. That is how Ken Buck, a conservative Republican out of Colorado, found common ground with Representative Cicilline, a liberal progressive Congressman from Rhode Island.

Our bill creates the rules of the road for these platforms so they can't abuse their gatekeeper power by favoring their own products or services and disadvantaging rivals in ways that harm competition.

In other words, examples are that Amazon won't be able to misuse small business data in order to copy their products. The best example of that is the Wall Street Journal reporting about a four-person luggage company out of Brooklyn, NY, advertising innocently, giving them the data they need to advertise, and, bam, a few months later, Amazon has the identical product in Amazon Basics.

Apple won't be able to stifle competition by blocking other companies' services from interoperating with their platforms, and Google won't be able to bias their platform search results in favor of their own products and services without merit. These platforms will no longer be able to put their own products and services automatically first. That is what we are talking about. Amazon should rank products based on price and quality, not based on their own profit margins.

In those new House Judiciary documents that I mentioned earlier, there is one from a Google executive that illustrates this point as well. It is an email about Amazon saying:

Amazon has a built-in incentive to partner with Alexa, since they will pull you from their store if you don't support it.

Again, that is an amazingly honest statement of the situation where rampant self-preferencing is allowed: A product might be great for consumers, but if it doesn't ``partner with Alexa''--forget it. They will pull it from the store to solidify their emerging power in voice assistants.

Second, the world's largest and most powerful platform shouldn't be allowed to copy small businesses' private data that they get from their sellers, as I just mentioned, to create knock-off products.

Third, in the bill, platforms shouldn't require companies, especially small companies, to buy a bunch of stuff from the monopolies, like ads or distribution services, in order to be listed at the top. They can offer those services. They can sell those services. But the only way you get to the top, so that when our pages here, sitting in the Chamber, are trying to look at the best deal for a fan, if they don't have air conditioning in their room--it was really hot in Washington, DC. Well, the best product should come up or the least expensive product. That is what should come up, not just something that Amazon Basics can make money off of. That is what the bill does.

It is not a breakup bill. It is not a ban on mergers, but it would put some commonsense rules of the road in place. If we can get these reforms in place, we will ensure a fairer, more competitive marketplace for small and medium businesses. This bill gives them more options, more flexibility, and more access to the markets.

Just today, the National Federation of Independence Businesses wrote to Senator Grassley and me to say that 84 percent of their members support Congress taking action--that is about the kind of numbers I would like to see around here, 84 percent--``to control unfair and anticompetitive practices of large tech companies.'' That is why they are formally endorsing the bill, writing:

Most small businesses have no choice but to rely in some capacity on these large technology companies for a variety of business needs, ranging from driving business traffic through search to online advertising to accessing key digital marketplaces.

For small business sellers using marketplace platforms, competition between the operator's own products and third- party sellers creates conflicts of interest and has been shown to lead to unfair business practices.

By the way, it is not just small business. There are a whole bunch of big businesses supporting it, too, only because they are not going to compete against the big titans. A lot of them don't want to say it out loud because they don't want to be punished. They just call us and tell us. That is what you deal with when you deal with monopolies. You are not going to out people who don't want it out there. But the truth is, there are a whole bunch of businesses that support this bill, in addition to a whole bunch of working people, in addition to my colleagues from all sides of the political spectrum.

What did the Justice Department say? They said:

Vesting the power to pick winners and losers across markets in a small number of corporations contravenes the foundations of our capitalist system, and given the increasing importance of these markets--

And that is very key here-- the power of such platforms is likely to continue to grow. . . .

That is what we are seeing right now with the small business rebellion.

This puts at risk the nation's economic progress and prosperity, ultimately threatening the economic liberty that undergirds our democracy.

That is the business group. Now, I will go to the consumer group. The Justice Department you just heard.

The Consumer Federation of America wrote:

We need to incentivize more competition and more innovation.

A group of legal scholars said:

It is an appropriate expression of democracy for Congress to enact pro-competitive statutes to maintain the vibrancy of the online economy.

Monopoly power, consumer choice, reduced innovation--these aren't topics that came up for the first time when we marked up and passed the bill. In fact, we got it out of committee 16 to 6, the first time since the advent of the internet, in a highly polarized, at times, Senate Judiciary Committee, for anyone who watched the Supreme Court hearings. We got that bill out 16 to 6, the first bill to advance to the Senate floor--the competition bill--since the advent of the internet.

We cannot stand by and do nothing while digital giants entrench their power to gobble up more businesses, gobble up bigger and bigger slices of the economy. I guess we can. I guess we can turn into this situation. But even these Senators, way back--they were all in here, unlike what I see right now. But they were all here, and they actually got something done. And this is our moment right now.

I urge my colleagues to bring this bill to the floor. I have gotten the commitment to get a vote on this bill. We have got to get this bill on a vote.

I appreciate Senator Grassley's patience and bipartisan support, but we know that we are up against a lot. But if they think that I am going to get scared by that, think again. I am ready to roll.

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