Bipartisan lawmakers introduce five bills directed at big tech

Yahoo Finance’s Dan Howley reports on the latest aim at big tech by lawmakers.

Video transcript

KRISTIN MYERS: Welcome back. Some breaking news for everyone, a bipartisan group of congressional members have introduced a series of antitrust bills that are taking direct aim at some of the big tech names, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. We have Yahoo Finance's tech editor Dan Howley here with all of the details. Hi, Dan.

DAN HOWLEY: How are you doing, Kristin? That's right, these are really kind of aimed at making sure that these lawmakers can further go after big tech companies like Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook, as far as antitrust goes. Now, these are the updates to the laws, the biggest updates in decades. And some of the measures that they're introducing would be to ban mergers and acquisitions for big tech companies, those are the four that were mentioned, with market capitalizations that exceed $600 billion unless they can prove that the companies that they want to acquire would not eventually become competitors.

There's also the ability to give the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission more action or more capability to go after anti-competitive behavior. And they want to bar corporate board members from serving on the boards of other platforms. They also want to make it harder for companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google, to offer services that in their own app stores or in their own stores that compete directly with third-party sellers.

So this is a big set of bills. It still has to go through the whole House and the Senate. And you can guarantee that there's going to be pushback from the big tech companies here.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right. Thanks so much, Dan for bringing us all of those details.