 Terralman Klobuchar, Ranking Member Lee, thank you so much for the opportunity to testify today on behalf of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit working in the public interest for over 20 years. I'm Charlotte Swayman, Competition Policy Director at Public Knowledge. Gatekeeper Power is at the root of big tech's competition problems. Experts, policymakers, and advocates the world over have identified gatekeeper power, sometimes bottleneck power, sometimes strategic market status, as the power that dominant digital platforms have over other businesses' ability to reach their customers. Right now, big tech has the power over us and our data. And we need to protect both users and a competitive market with new laws and rules to promote fair competition against them. Until we have a real choice to leave these platforms, if we're not happy with them, they won't have the incentive to win us over and will continue to miss out on disruptive innovations that challenge the status quo. I wanna take this opportunity to highlight important legislation that I think can help to address the underlying power dynamics that have led us here. Interoperability, data portability, and delegatability are the privacy protective ways to neutralize the power that big data confers upon dominant digital platforms. Right now, if I'm frustrated with how Facebook treats my data, I don't really have the option to leave because my friends and family, the businesses, groups, and even schools I need to communicate with are on Facebook. Interoperability would allow competition to flourish by letting users communicate across platforms. Look to the Access Act for a model of implementing interoperability to maximize competition and protect privacy. These platforms can abuse their gatekeeper power to freeze out would be competitors from the market. And one of the tools for that anti-competitive discrimination is big data. Gatekeeper platforms can put their own products first on the page, give them the best attention grabbing design, and point users away from companies that pose a competitive threat. While this offends our basic notions of fairness, this behavior would be difficult to stop using our existing antitrust laws. We need a non-discrimination law to reliably stop it. And I'm so glad to see Newsreplay Chairwoman Klobuchar is working on just such a bill here in the Senate. There's a strong model in the American Choice and Innovation Online Act from Chairman David Cecilini in the House. Strict limitations on mergers by dominant digital platforms and giving our federal antitrust enforcers the ability to sue to break up vertically integrated dominant digital platforms are also important parts of how we can address gatekeeper power. The Platform Competition and Opportunity Act and the Ending Platform Monopolies Act are strong examples of how these tools could work. These four bills were recently endorsed by a BARC bipartisan group of 32 state attorneys general. App stores and operating systems preference their own products when it comes to communication with the user and to data, the Open App Markets Act zeroes in on the gatekeeper role that app stores play. Purposeful narrowing of our antitrust laws by the courts have left big business with a license to engage in a host of anti-competitive conduct. A myopic focus on price and other easily quantifiable effects leaves out important innovation and consumer choice harms that antitrust is supposed to address. Terrowman Klobuchar's Competition and Antitrust Law Enforcement Reform Act would help rein in the power of big data by updating the legal standards for blocking mergers and stopping exclusionary conduct. Competition is not a panacea for the challenges of big data. We also urgently need new privacy laws to protect users and a digital regulator to comprehensively address the policy questions surrounding digital platforms. A comprehensive federal privacy law could be pro-competitive by creating a level playing field for dominant incumbents and new entrants alike. For decades, Washington has taken the perspective that we need to let digital businesses run wild to see what great innovations they might come up with. But today, unscrupulous data practices and consolidated power have led us to a place that isn't anyone's dream of what the internet was supposed to be. These largely unregulated platforms have been allowed to amass powerful gatekeeper roles where they need not fear competition or government intervention. For users to really have control, we need to have a real choice to leave these platforms. We need real competitors and we need switching to be easy. To get those things, we need new laws and rules to promote fair competition on and against gatekeeper platforms like Google and Facebook. Congress has already done a lot of the work of introducing a series of bills to combat these harms. The best time to pass them was 10 years ago, but the second best time is now. Thank you.