The American economy can only deliver on its promise of broad prosperity when it is truly competitive: when consumers have multiple options; when many businesses battle for consumer dollars; when entrepreneurs can create and grow their small businesses; when workers have options and unions to protect them. Unfortunately, the broader economy is evaporating like a mirage in the Nevada desert as a handful of vast technology firms use their monopoly power to eliminate opportunities to search, to compete, to shop, and to work. 

What kind of economy do the immensely wealthy executives of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google envision? Think back to the Gilded Age, when robber barons sipped Cognac and bribed politicians while their hired goons assaulted workers fighting for living wages and working families paid monopoly prices for kerosene and sugar. Or think back to AT&T’s telephone monopoly: clumsy phones, arrogant service and brutal prices.

These Tech Giants have similar aims. They use their status as industry gatekeepers not to enhance the consumer experience but to guide consumers unknowingly towards favored products or their own proprietary brands.  Amazon claims to encourage small and minority-owned businesses, but Amazon ruthlessly exploits these “partners.” When they’re not using small firms’ proprietary data to develop Amazon’s own branded, competing products, they’re skimming more than a third of those businesses' revenue — in exchange for substandard or non-existent services. 

According to Amazon’s own job listings, a warehouse worker in Reno can expect to make $17.25 an hour. For comparison's sake, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos makes roughly $9 million dollars an hour. How can workers, whether Nevadans or the residents of other states, expect to create pathways to the middle class when the reality is, no matter how hard they work, their wages won’t keep up with inflation while a tech billionaire far off in Silicon Valley is profiting many times over from their labor? That’s not to mention the work Amazon does to suppress the organizing efforts of its workers. Some of Amazon’s profit goes directly into the pockets of three-thousand-dollar-a-day union-busting consultants who lead misleading and intimidating campaigns against warehouse workers.

Then there’s Google’s monopoly on search, advertising, and mobile, which makes it almost impossible for other companies, especially small businesses, to compete. By controlling both ad selling and ad buying platforms, and selling its inventory through those platforms, Google stifles competition in the digital ad marketplace and deprives consumers of a wide range of information in their search results.   

Meanwhile, Apple exerts total control over its smartphone App Store, limiting the ability of outside app developers to compete with Apple’s apps on either price or features — and Apple charges competitors outlandish fees even when they are allowed to sell to iPhone users.

It’s past time to fight back, and S.2992, aka the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) is an excellent start. The measure would prevent dominant tech platforms from favoring their own products and services and unfairly discriminating against competitors. It would encourage the emergence of innovators and the growth of small businesses, expand consumer choice and perhaps even energize the efforts of hourly workers organizing for better lives. 

Of course, as monopolists always do, they tell us it’s all for our own good. Only Apple can protect us from scammers or predators or the Chinese, they tell us. Only an unfettered Amazon can guarantee next day delivery with Prime, they say. And if Google is reined in, we’ll lose access to Maps and end up driving around lost and confused.

These claims are laughable. The AICOA will not prevent digital platforms from offering services like Google Maps and Amazon Prime. Rather, it means that if a better competitor emerges, the big platforms can’t ignore them or deny them equal access to consumers.

As for consumer protection, Facebook was fined $5 billion by the FTC after revelations that it was using deceptive practices and sharing its users’ personal information without permission with third-party apps. Google was fined for violating children’s privacy laws when YouTube collected personal information from children without their parents’ consent, and has been accused of secretly tracking users.

There is this, too: How robust a commitment to national security can we expect from a company like Apple, which is dependent on both cheap Chinese labor and the vast Chinese markets for its extraordinary profitability? Or Google, which opened an artificial intelligence lab in China, just as China declared passing the U.S. in AI a national priority, and whose work in China was characterized by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Marine General James Dunford  as “more of a direct benefit to the Chinese military.”

Competition has always been what makes the American economy thrive. It’s good for everybody – except for entrenched interests worried that their huge monopoly profits might be affected. The Nevada and American economies are already being made less competitive and more unequal because a handful of giants wield economic and political power not seen in a century.

Voters have had enough. A poll released just this week by the Tech Oversight Project and Hart Research showed that 70 percent of Nevada voters surveyed want their congressional representative to vote to pass AICOA. It’s past time to fight the power. We need our elected officials in Congress to fight for Nevada’s consumers, small businesses, and our economy and support this important legislation.

Chris Giunchigliani is a former Clark County commissioner and Assemblywoman.