Congress could require Facebook to build more open APIs under new bill

Over the past few months, lawmakers have taken aim at Big Tech, calling out companies like Facebook for anti-competitive behavior and sometimes threatening to break them up entirely. But on Tuesday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is expected to introduce a new bill with the goal of encouraging market competition by requiring large platforms to make their users’ data interoperable.

The “Augmenting Compatibility and Competition by Enabling Service Switching” (ACCESS) Act would, in theory, force tech giants like Facebook and Google to make their services interoperable with those provided by smaller companies. In a press release announcing the bill, the senators claimed that by requiring data interoperability and portability for platforms,...

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