Sacramento, CA — Despite a tidal wave of opposition spending by Big Tech and corporate lobbyists, the California Senate Judiciary Committee today advanced the COMPETE Act (AB 1776, Aguiar-Curry), which represents the most significant expansion of state antitrust enforcement in more than a century. In response to the forward motion of the bill, the American Economic Liberties Project released the following statement:

“Today’s vote is a major victory for every Californian who is tired of watching monopolies and conglomerates rig markets at the expense of small businesses and ordinary people,”  said Lee Hepner, Senior Counsel at American Economic Liberties Project. “States are being called on to lead, and California lawmakers are standing with regular working people against the empty claims of the California Chamber of Commerce, which is being exposed as nothing more than a trade group for monopolists. At an inflection point for federal antitrust enforcement, the COMPETE Act charts the path to the next generation of shared prosperity in the state of California. We look forward to working with lawmakers to get this bill to the governor’s desk and to ensure that California remains a place where opportunities abound, innovation thrives, and success is earned on the merits, unrestrained by the grip of monopoly power.”

The bill now moves to the Senate Appropriations Committee. If passed by the full Senate before the August 31 deadline, it will head to Governor Newsom.

Background:

Backed by a widespread coalition of consumer and antitrust advocates, labor, small businesses, and trade associations, the COMPETE Act is a long overdue attempt to bring California back to its innovative, and competitive roots.

California’s Cartwright Act, its core antitrust law passed in 1907, does not prohibit “illegal monopolization” conduct by a single firm to harm competition. In fact, California is one of only five states in the country without such a prohibition. The “single firm conduct loophole” means that when challenging anticompetitive conduct —  like Live Nation’s bundling of its venue and ticketing businesses, or Google’s exclusive control over distribution of its search engine — Californians are forced into federal courts and made vulnerable to the narrowed scope of federal antitrust laws.

In a recent case brought by the State of California against Amazon, which alleged conduct that pressured third-party sellers to hike prices across non-Amazon retail channels or risk being de-platformed, for example, Amazon exploited the single firm conduct loophole to argue that its conduct was outside the reach of the Cartwright Act.

The COMPETE Act is grounded in a three-year study by the nonpartisan California Law Revision Commission, informed by dozens of antitrust experts, economists, and practitioners, including government enforcers and defense counsel for Fortune 500 companies.

Recent amendments to the bill explicitly exempt approximately 98% of California businesses, focusing the bill’s reach on the largest firms with the market power to inflict competitive harm.

Support for the bill includes independent trade associations such as the Black and Filipino American Chambers of Commerce, tech company Yelp, consumer protection groups, labor unions, the California District Attorneys Association, and dozens of named small business owners.

Major tech companies and their industry allies have spent over $6 million lobbying against the bill and other matters in the first quarter of 2026 alone, according to disclosures reported by The Lever.

Learn more about Economic Liberties here.