Open and fair competition in the digital marketplace drives our members’ success, but the proposals in the Open App Markets Act will hinder our small business members’ opportunity for continued prosperity.
When the largest sellers on the app stores, with multi-billion-dollar valuations, come to Congress with proposals to reshape the mobile marketplace to suit their needs, policymakers should be rather skeptical. We urge Congress not to sacrifice consumers’ most important privacy and security protections–and with them, the competitive prospects of small app companies–in order to further advantage the app stores’ biggest winners.
For more than two years now, we have cautioned against efforts to enact a government takeover of app stores. In this effort, we warned policymakers of the potential for such reforms to impose higher barriers to entry for small developers, mandatory degradation of quality for consumers and app makers, and the introduction of serious threats to privacy and security in the mobile ecosystem.
Small app developers deserve the ability to compete and continue to deliver innovation.