Scott Wiener and Garry Tan Team Up to Tackle Big Tech’s Anti-Competitive Behavior

An unlikely duo of moderate Democrats has teamed up once again to introduce a bill banning anticompetitive behavior from Big Tech.

State Sen. Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, announced the new legislation on Wednesday at the San Francisco headquarters of Y Combinator. Immediately following Wiener, CEO and political lightning rod Garry Tan extolled the virtues of SB 1074, which would prohibit any company with a market capitalization greater than $1 trillion and with 100 million or more monthly users in the U.S., from favoring their own products and services on their own platforms.

“At the end of the day, all of these behaviors come down to one thing: massive, dominant corporations favoring their own products and services over their competitors,” Wiener said. “Our economic system is premised on fair competition and open markets with over a century of federal law. But a few platforms have gotten so big that the old tools have proven inadequate.”

European regulators have already begun to pressure Big Tech companies that function as gatekeepers to play nice and stop self-preferencing their own products at the expense of smaller companies with competing products.

Wiener cited examples from four of the largest Big Tech companies: Apple’s App Store, which can charge up to a 30% commission fee on digital purchases, and also blocks some apps, claiming they are insecure or malicious. Some developers have successfully sued over false claims and had their apps reinstated onto the store.

Google has expanded the number of ads at the top of search engine results pages, often presenting several sponsored results before the first organic link. Paid ads are now integrated directly into AI-powered search overviews, appearing in high-volume, commercial searches rather than just top-of-funnel queries

Meta has been accused of restricting or disadvantaging competing apps on its platforms, and Amazon has faced repeated allegations and investigations over practices such as manufacturing its own versions of competitive products and burying third-party retailers in consumer search results.

“The open web — the thing that made the first generation of internet companies possible — is being quietly swallowed,” Tan said. “We’re not here to punish companies for being good at what they do,” said Tan, sounding not unlike a politician himself. “And we’re not against Big Tech. But we are for Little Tech.”

Wiener noted that Big Tech’s behavior has been the subject of litigation as well. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and lower courts have largely upheld rulings against Apple’s App Store “anti-steering” policies, forcing Apple to allow developers to link to external payment options.

In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys general sued Amazon for its anti-discounting policies. In 2024, a federal judge ruled Google held monopoly power in the markets for general search engine services and text advertising, and had unlawfully used that power to keep competitors out.

Tan has helped lead the effort to shift San Francisco’s Democratic politics away from progressivism, and he’s worked with Wiener since 2023. Along with the California Democratic Party, Tan endorsed Wiener for his bid to fill Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s seat when she retires this year.

Tan made headlines in 2024 when he drunkenly tweeted: “Die slow” at eight San Francisco supervisors to his more than 400,000 followers. Tan has since apologized and deleted the post.

Given Gov. Gavin Newsom’s cultivation of Silicon Valley donors as he eyes a potential bid for the White House, some question the prospects of SB 1074 in Sacramento, along with that of its companion bill in the state Assembly, AB 1776.

Wiener, whose initial, provocative attempt to regulate Big Tech and AI was crushed by the governor in 2024, acknowledged the challenge.

“We’re going up against some of the largest corporations in the history of Planet Earth. And it’s going to be a bruising fight, but we’re on the right side, and we’re going to have a big grassroots coalition, and we will make the case to Gov. Newsom,” Wiener said.

Wiener also said his bill could help consumers see the full benefit from the AI boom playing out in San Francisco today and build public confidence. This presumably includes San Francisco voters and entrepreneurs who feel Big Tech has thwarted their interests in conversations over legislation and regulation in Sacramento and Washington. SB 1074’s name, the “BASED Act,” winks at internet slang while spelling out its full ambition: Blocking Anti-Competitive Self-Preferencing by Entrenched Dominant Platforms.

AI also hands malicious actors the same speed and scale as would-be entrepreneurs, making it easier than ever to flood the web with fraudulent apps and convincing scams. It’s the kind of threat that might make less technologically sophisticated consumers grateful for Apple’s app review process or Google’s spam filters.

But Tan waved away the concern that the BASED Act might make average consumers more vulnerable as a classic Big Tech talking point. Instead, he argued, AI is so democratizing that “having a truly secure computing environment is now in the hands of the end user,” a claim that may land differently for San Francisco voters who aren’t techies.