MIKE DAVIS: Congress must finally kill the hidden tax in your online shopping cart

Every time you buy something online, you pay a toll. You just never see it.

It doesn't show up on your receipt. No politician voted for it. But it's baked into the price of nearly everything you buy, and it flows straight into the pockets of the most powerful corporations on earth.

That's the racket Amazon built. The Senate finally has a chance to break it by passing the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA).

When Amazon first opened its marketplace, it took roughly 19 cents of every dollar an independent seller earned. Today it takes close to half. Listing fees. Advertising fees. Fulfillment fees. Penalties for sellers who dare to offer a better price somewhere else. A small business owner in Ohio or Arizona forks over 45 to 50 cents on the dollar just for the privilege of reaching customers Amazon already cornered.

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Sellers can't eat those costs. So they raise prices. And Amazon punishes any seller who charges less on another website. List your product cheaper on your own store, and Amazon buries you in their search results. So prices climb everywhere, on every site, whether you shop at Amazon or not. This tollbooth taxes the entire internet. Groceries, gadgets, the everyday basics in every family budget all carry the same invisible markup.

It gets worse. Amazon's marketplace is flooded with sellers shipping cheap goods straight from China, dodging the safety rules, tariffs, and taxes that American businesses can't escape. The family shop on Main Street follows every rule and still loses shelf space to faceless overseas operations that follow none. Amazon's own search results often push shoppers toward those listings, because cheap goods move fast and the fees roll in no matter who pockets the sale. Amazon profits either way. American families don't.

Conservatives know this company from the other side, too. This is the same Amazon that yanked books off its virtual shelves when the content offended the leftist sensibilities of San Francisco and Silicon Valley. Pull a title here, throttle a seller there–all by whatever standard the elite invented that week. A company with this much control over what Americans can buy, read, and sell isn't a neutral marketplace. It's a gatekeeper with an agenda.

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This week, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa reintroduced AICOA. The idea is simple enough that a fifth grader gets it. If you own the marketplace, you shouldn't get to rig it in your own favor. AICOA stops Big Tech's dominant platforms from burying competitors, strong-arming sellers into pricing nobody wanted, and using their size to crush everyone beneath them. Competition returns. Prices come down. The little guy gets a fair shot.

AICOA is one piece of the puzzle. Two more bills sit before the Senate Judiciary Committee, and they belong together.

The Open App Markets Act takes on Apple and Google, which pocket up to 30 percent of every app, subscription, and purchase Americans make on their phones. Picture a landlord who skims a third of every sale in every store he owns, then forbids you from shopping anywhere else. That's the app economy under Big Tech right now.

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The AMERICA Act targets Google's chokehold on digital advertising. Google runs the auction, owns the exchange, and represents the buyer and the seller at the same time. Small businesses pay more to advertise, and you pay more for everything they sell. End that conflict of interest and you put money back in Main Street's pocket.

Three bills. One goal. Stop the gatekeepers from taxing the whole economy.

AICOA has previously cleared the Judiciary Committee once on a lopsided bipartisan vote. More than 100 groups have backed it, free-market conservatives and consumer advocates alike. Affordability is the rare issue that unites a furious country.

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The lobbyists will swarm. They always do. They'll warn that reining in these companies hands a gift to China, kills innovation, breaks the internet you love. Save it. We've heard this script before. Every monopoly in American history swore that competition would wreck everything, right up until competition proved them wrong.

Big Tech's oligarchs are trying to do the same because they built their fortunes by crushing competition, then dressed up the wreckage as progress. A market with real rivals innovates circles around a monopoly that answers to no one. China wins when America shields its monopolies. America wins when it unleashes its entrepreneurs.

The Senate Judiciary Committee should advance all three bills. No delay. No watering them down. Americans are sick of paying a toll to corporations that answer to no voter and serve no master but their own bottom line.

Cut the tollbooth. Open the markets. Let Americans compete again.

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