Washington didn’t build Florida’s 3.5 million small businesses. Low taxes, light regulation, and an entrepreneurial culture built an economy where 3.8 million Floridians clock in every day for a small employer. Proposed changes to America’s antitrust laws now threaten to undermine Florida’s small businesses by targeting the e-commerce platforms, app stores, and search tools that let a Tampa boutique sell to Tokyo and a Keys charter captain book clients in Calgary.
The American Innovation and Choice Online Act, or AICOA for short, has been here before and its backers are reportedly preparing another run. In 2022, it advanced through the Senate Judiciary Committee before stalling on the floor. In 2023, it failed to receive a hearing. The bill targets the marketplaces, app stores, and search engines that Florida’s small businesses benefit from to find customers, process payments, and compete nationally. In reworking how these platforms operate, proponents of the legislation hope to level the playing field between tech companies and small businesses.The reality is simpler: AICOA would hurt Florida’s small businesses far more than it hurts the platforms it targets.
Previous iterations of AICOA targeted the largest technology platforms, those with more than 50 million monthly active users or 100,000 business users, owned by companies with market capitalizations exceeding $550 billion, by designating them as “covered platforms.” Once designated, these platforms faced a sweeping set of prohibitions: they could not preference their own products in search results, condition platform access on the purchase of other services, use data generated by business users to compete against them, or restrict users from uninstalling preloaded software. Violations carried significant civil penalties of up to 15 percent of total U.S. revenue.
If AICOA is reintroduced in the same form, the marketplaces that Florida small businesses depend on would face restrictions that sever the very connections they were built to create. While Amazon is known as a marketplace for every item imaginable, it’s also a marketplace that connects over 200 million Prime Subscribers in the United States to small businesses. Once designated as a covered platform, Amazon and other platforms won’t be able to offer preferred placement, personalized rankings, or an integrated checkout. Such restrictions don’t hurt the digital commerce giants; they hurt the retailers across Florida that have built their businesses on access to those consumers.
AICOA restricts how covered platforms use nonpublic business user data, framed by its sponsors as protection against large technology companies. What AICOA actually restricts is the recommendation infrastructure Florida small businesses depend on to reach customers they could never afford to find on their own. The algorithm that highlights a boutique in Pensacola, or routes a homeowner to a local contractor rather than a national chain, runs on customer data. If Congress cuts off access to that data, the rankings will be less accurate and less personal. The small business that once appeared at the top of a relevant search slides down the page behind whoever has a marketing budget.
AICOA’s supporters would have you believe the bill is about leveling the playing field between large platforms and small businesses. That without federal intervention, large technology companies will squeeze small businesses off the platforms they depend on. The platforms AICOA targets are not obstacles to Florida’s small business economy. Instead, they enable small businesses to grow and contribute to a vibrant economy. E-commerce platforms are what let a fishing charter captain in Islamorada fill his calendar without a marketing department. If Congress regulates them into neutrality, it won’t level the playing field, but risks pulling up the ladder.
