California State Senator Scott Wiener has introduced SB 1074, the BASED Act (Blocking Anticompetitive Self-preferencing by Entrenched Dominant platforms), a bill that would prohibit digital platforms with market capitalizations exceeding $1 trillion and 100 million or more monthly U.S. users from favoring their own products over competitors. The legislation targets practices central to how Apple, Amazon, Google, and Meta maintain dominance: manipulating search result rankings, using non-public third-party seller data to develop and boost competing products, and restricting consumer data portability. Wiener framed the bill explicitly as protection for the emerging generation of AI-powered startups, which increasingly must operate on infrastructure owned and controlled by their direct competitors.
The bill has attracted broad support. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan called it "exactly the kind of common-sense antitrust reform we need if we want the next generation of startups to have a fair shot." DuckDuckGo's Chief Communications and Policy Officer Kamyl Bazbaz connected the bill to AI and privacy competition, noting that self-preferencing tactics "make it harder for people to discover and switch to privacy-respecting alternatives." Cory Doctorow, Proton, Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman, Fight for the Future, and Economic Security California Action also signed on. The coalition spans venture capital, Big Tech competitors, and digital rights advocates — converging on shared concern over platform gatekeeping rather than any unified political alignment.
For the AI agent ecosystem specifically, the data portability provisions and anti-self-preferencing rules carry direct consequences. Distribution on dominant platforms is a pressing concern for AI startups, whose products typically reach users through app stores, search engines, and cloud marketplaces controlled by incumbents. If enacted, the BASED Act would make it illegal for covered platforms to structurally disadvantage competing AI products in those channels, or to exploit behavioral data gathered from third-party developers to build and promote their own AI offerings. App store and cloud market regulators in the EU and UK have pursued similar lines of attack, with mixed enforcement results.
Reaction on Hacker News ran largely in favor of the bill's intent, though the thread surfaced pointed skepticism about scope. Several commenters argued that self-preferencing rules alone leave deeper structural advantages untouched — capital accumulation, patent system abuse, and network effects that compound over time. A recurring view was that California-level legislation, however well-drafted, is a workaround for federal antitrust action that Congress has not delivered. The BASED Act now moves through the California legislature; if it survives, it would be the most explicit U.S. statutory protection AI startups have against the platforms they depend on.