House Introduces 'Innovation' Act That Will Kill Innovation

from the not-great,-bob dept

A few weeks ago, we warned that Congress should not include the ridiuculously dangerous SHOP SAFE bill in the expected USICA bill. Unfortunately, Congress did not listen.

On Tuesday, Nancy Pelosi released the text of the renamed America Creating Opportunities for Manufacturing, Pre-Eminence in Technology and Economic Strength Act of 2022 (or America COMPETES Act). This is for the bill that had already been renamed from Endless Frontiers to USICA. As we noted in our last post, the crux of the bill actually is really important -- as it attempts to build out a much better infrastructure in the US for core research and development into science and technology. If the bill were actually just about that, I might support it.

But... the bill is an astounding 2912 pages long.

And with nearly 3,000 pages, you would be right in assuming that the House lit this thing up like a Christmas tree full of favors for certain members of Congress. And apparently that includes Rep. Jerry Nadler, who is the main sponsor of the SHOP SAFE Act, which is included in whole -- with no changes, despite the widespread criticism -- in the bill. If you're trying to find it, it starts on page 1672 of the 2912 pages. In other words, buried almost directly in the middle. Gotta hide all the bad stuff, I guess.

There are a few other bad bills included in the COMPETES Act as well, but I'm not going to go through each and every bit of nonsense in the 3000 page bill right now. But I will note that the SHOP SAFE bit is not just actively dangerous, but it undermines the rest of the bill. It does the exact opposite of what's on the tin: it will do significant damage to both innovation and competition, and basically lock in Amazon as the only place where people can sell stuff.

Nadler might as well have named it the "give Amazon a monopoly" Act. I have no idea why Speaker Pelosi would agree to put this piece of garbage in this bill, other than there must be a lot of favor trading going on. As policy expert Josh Lamel noted (accurately), this bill will make life really difficult for anyone who say, uses Etsy, in order to protect some giant European luxury brands who were asking for this nonsense bill in an attempt to control the online marketplace.

We've been talking about SOPA a lot in the past few weeks, and the SHOP SAFE is effectively a SOPA-level bad bill. It basically ends the open internet for selling, unless you're willing to go through the largest platforms, which will have massive compliance rules that will make it close to impossible for small sellers. It's madness.

And... for what? I guess this is an acknowledgement that Nadler can't get SHOP SAFE passed through the regular methods, so he has to hang it on a giant bill to try to sneak it through. That alone is reason enough to reject it. This is the kind of nonsense that makes people cynical and distrustful of the political class, sneaking through bad bills that harm the public but favor giant companies. There's plenty of good stuff in the COMPETES Act. And it's all poisoned with nonsense favor bills like SHOP SAFE (and some others).

Filed Under: america competes, competes, competition, innovation, jerry nadler, marketplaces, nancy pelosi, shop safe