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Official title: Restore competition in online search and digital advertising markets, to prevent exclusionary conduct by covered platforms, and for other purposes.
Introduced July 15, 2026 by Amy Klobuchar · Last progress July 15, 2026
The bill aims to open dominant search and ad platforms to competition and give users more choice and privacy controls, but it does so at the cost of sizable compliance burdens, increased privacy and legal risks, and potential impacts on innovation, convenience, and regulatory uncertainty.
Consumers and small businesses gain more competition, lower prices, and greater choice in search, search ads, and related services because the bill restricts platform self‑preferencing and enables courts/FTC to require remedies that restore competitive conditions.
Competing search engines, startups, developers, and advertisers can access major platforms' indexes, ad data, syndication APIs, and query-level exports, lowering entry costs and enabling new products and innovation.
Everyday users get stronger choice and control over defaults (choice screens, annual prompts, and restrictions on pay-to-play/preinstallation) and clearer privacy limits on individually identifying search data.
Covered platforms will face substantial compliance and implementation costs across many requirements (data-sharing APIs, reporting, monthly exports, UI/UX changes), and those costs are likely to be passed on to consumers, advertisers, and small businesses.
Sharing deidentified search/query data, real-time exports, and impression APIs increases privacy and data‑security risks because deidentification can fail and broader access raises chances of misuse or reidentification.
The Act raises regulatory and legal uncertainty—through expanded judicial review, APA processes, complex definitions (e.g., 'systematic bias'), broad rulemaking delegation to the Commission, and interactions with existing laws—likely increasing litigation and slowing agency action.
Based on analysis of 15 sections of legislative text.
Imposes antitrust rules on large search platforms: bans self‑preferencing, requires data/index licensing at marginal cost, choice screens, advertiser transparency, and civil enforcement with large penalties.
Sets rules for large search platforms to prevent self-preferencing and require nondiscriminatory access to search indexes, ranking signals, and ad inventory for qualified competitors. It creates disclosure, data‑sharing, choice‑screen, licensing, and enforcement requirements and empowers the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general, and the Justice Department to enforce civil penalties. Imposes operational obligations (APIs, marginal‑cost licensing, query/ad transparency, choice screens, annual certifications and training), defines covered platforms and key terms, requires APA rulemaking for agency guidance, and sunsets after 10 years unless extended.