Once again – the American Innovation and Choice Act is the Wrong Choice for American Consumers.  

Trust is the invisible infrastructure that makes our modern digital lives possible. When users pull out their smartphones, they trust that their banking details, private conversations, and personal health data are secure.  

At a time when new sophisticated AI models have shown they can hunt down previously unknown cybersecurity vulnerabilities across almost every major operating system (OS) and web browser, and then string them together in sophisticated attack chains, we need to up our game. We need to make sure that our mobile technologies, and the policies that support them, are designed with privacy safety and security safeguards built in from the start so they can withstand this dynamically changing threat environment.  

That is why we are especially dismayed to hear reports that a few Senators plan to once again introduce the controversial American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA) – a bill which essentially copies Europe’s failed Digital Markets Act (DMA) – and undermines core consumer safeguards designed to protect user privacy, safety, and security. 

Despite the heightened threat environment, and the growing evidence of Europe’s failed DMA regulatory experiment, these Senators are proposing legislation that mirrors key mistakes risking the same technical consequences — potentially putting millions of consumers’ devices at risk. The legislation would fundamentally undermine the security and privacy features that have made modern mobile devices so powerful and useful.

As a result of the DMA, European consumers and businesses now face a less secure, less innovative, and more fragmented digital experience. The DMA:

• Opened a Critical App Governance Gap. The DMA, by opening up the gatekeepers’ gates, has opened the floodgates to apps with illicit and pornographic content; has opened up new ways to defraud; scam and rip off consumers and businesses; has led to a rush in intellectual property theft enabling apps; and has opened a backdoor through which parents can no longer protect children and the apps they access. This has created a major digital disconnect between ambitions to advance a safer app store ecosystem and disjointed digital rules that create a sideloading backdoor for harmful apps — expanding some of the exact harms the consumers and policymakers wanted to mitigate. Apps that are removed from the official app store because they may harm kids, consumers or creators, now have a way to get right back onto the platform as a sideloaded app or through one of the new shady third party app stores.  
• Created Damaging Mobile Security Mandates: The DMA also exacerbates some of the very mobile security risks that other parts of the government are trying to protect against – creating vast new security weaknesses that put consumers and businesses at risk.  Its interoperability rules dangerously disable key security safeguards designed to protect user privacy and safety, opening up  enormous challenges for consumers, businesses, critical infrastructure, and national security.  For businesses these requirements can expose enterprise networks, critical infrastructure and daily operations to disruptive and expensive new security threats – risks that can start with a simple mobile phishing attack. According to Lookout, a single mobile phishing attack, for example, could cost a 5,000-employee organization almost $4 million.Lookout’s threat report found that mobile phishing is now one of the biggest challenges facing IT and security teams today. This isn’t the time to be weakening American security, or mandating interoperable insecurity.  
• Impedes Competition and Innovation: The DMA also has had broad negative impacts on Europe’s broader economic ecosystem, inhibiting competition and opportunities to advance a more dynamic, vibrant, innovative, and trustworthy ecosystem that can lift its economy and propel new competition. Despite the DMA’s pro-competition goals, the DMA is triggering major economic losses of as much as €114 billion for firms across the broader EU economy, with total turnover in the sectors considered down up to 0.64% per year since May 2023, according to economic analysis by Lama Economic Research. 

Despite claims to the contrary, the proposal undermines, not enhances competition.  In smartphones for example, the only United States court to have fully considered federal antitrust claims against Apple, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, held that Apple was not a monopoly, and Apple’s app store and no-sideloading rules were pro-competitive, not anti-competitive, providing both interbrand competition and giving consumers the ability to choose the safer alternative.  This proposal would undermine competition on the merits, choice, and user security in an era of cyber conflict.  In short, it would abandon antitrust law in favor of European style technology market regulation and undermine U.S. national security.  This is the wrong path in an era of global technology competition.

Americans deserve a vibrant mobile digital ecosystem that is innovative, safe and secure, competitive and trustworthy. An ecosystem that expands business opportunities, grows the economy, improves people’s lives, and enables them to do things never before possible because they trust the technology to protect their privacy, safety, and security.  But the American Innovation and Choice Act is the wrong choice for American consumers. Replicating Europe’s failed experiment is not just the wrong choice, but is an especially harmful choice at a time when Mythos has demonstrated we need to up our game if we want a more trusted and innovative future.