The Open Markets Institute writes to Chair Schakowksy and ranking member McMorris Rodgers of the House Energy and Commerce committee in order to offer its thoughts on the discussion that has begun on new comprehensive privacy legislation.

Open Market's explains that America’s privacy crisis derives largely from a failure to regulate online platforms like Google, Facebook, and Amazon as the networked middlemen monopolists that they are. This has left these corporations free to use their immense power as monopolists, along with the vast caches of private information they collect from their customers, in ways that no previous networked middleman monopolist was allowed to do. The result has been disastrous not only for the privacy of all Americans, but for our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce, and system of free elections.

Read the full letter here.