On April 21, 2026, the California Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection Committee voted against Senate Bill 1074 (SB 1074), effectively halting a significant legislative effort to regulate the market dominance of major technology corporations. The bill, titled the Blocking Anticompetitive Self-preferencing by Entrenched Dominant platforms (BASED) Act, failed to secure the necessary votes to advance to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
Introduced by State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), SB 1074 established a regulatory framework for covered providers. Under the proposed text, these were defined as digital platforms with a global market capitalization exceeding $1 trillion and a domestic user base of at least 100 million monthly active users. This criteria specifically targeted the operations of industry leaders including Apple, Google, Meta, and Amazon.
The core of the legislation focused on prohibiting self-preferencing conduct. Technical provisions in the bill would have barred these platforms from manipulating search results or rankings to favor their own products and services over those of third-party competitors. Furthermore, the act sought to mandate interoperability, requiring mobile operating system providers to allow the installation of competing application stores and permitting users to sideload software without using proprietary storefronts such as the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.
During the committee hearing on April 21, supporters of the bill, including Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan and representatives from Economic Security California Action, argued that the legislation was necessary to protect startups and mid-sized companies from being walled off from the digital marketplace. Shane Gill, co-founder of AltStore, testified that the bill would provide California with protections similar to those granted by the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), which has already forced technical changes to mobile ecosystems in that region.
Opposition to the bill centered on concerns regarding cybersecurity and the integrity of integrated ecosystems. Industry trade groups and some committee members argued that the mandates for third-party app access and data portability would introduce significant security vulnerabilities and technical degradations to existing hardware and software. Critics also contended that the bill’s enforcement model, which was based on the Cartwright Act and included a private right of action, would lead to excessive litigation and stifle innovation within the state's technology sector.
Following the vote, Senator Wiener stated that while the bill failed to advance in its current form, he remains committed to exploring alternative options to address what he described as monopolistic interference in the digital economy. The committee’s decision marks a pause in state-level antitrust efforts that aimed to bypass the relative stagnation of federal tech regulation.