Klobuchar: “You need laws that work...So, big surprise — our laws should be as sophisticated as our economy right now”

LISTEN TO KLOBUCHAR INTERVIEW HERE

WASHINGTON – In an interview with Marketplace Tech, U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust, and Consumer Rights, highlighted the need to update our competition and privacy laws to protect consumers and online businesses.

“You can’t have the economy change to be focused on tech, and not make one change to our federal privacy laws, or to our competition policy. So, big surprise — our laws should be as sophisticated as our economy right now,” Klobuchar told Marketplace Tech host Kimberly Adams.

Klobuchar continued by elaborating on the importance of modernizing privacy policies: “Federal privacy law is going to be right there up front, because we have a patchwork of laws and we need a strong one on the federal side so that people can decide what they want to do with their own data. We don’t have any controls that are meaningful for you to protect your data. It’s too complicated the way they have it.”

She also emphasized the need to reform the laws governing competition in the digital economy, noting that this “means everything from making sure that you don’t have misinformation out there...to stopping these companies from self-preferencing, which is a fancy word to mean that can’t put their own products, that they own, at the top of their dominant search engines.”

Last month, Klobuchar introduced the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act to set commonsense rules of the road for major digital platforms to ensure they cannot unfairly preference their own products and services. It has received support from the Washington Post Editorial Board, Consumer Reports, the Boston Globe Editorial Board, and several leading organizations.

Listen to the full interview HERE.

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