By Emmanuel Mounier, Secretary General, Global Travel Tech.
Every few years, the same story gets told in Washington. A senator proposes reining in a dominant online platform. Commentators reach for the same framing. America builds while Europe regulates. One side bets on innovation, the other on rules. The US shall not replicate Europe’s mistakes. It is a compelling and convenient story but it also happens to be, unsurprisingly, not the full story.
Last month, on the 10th of June, Senators Chuck Grassley and Amy Klobuchar reintroduced the American Innovation and Choice Online Act (AICOA), the third version of the bill since it first appeared in 2021. The bill would stop the largest online platforms from favouring their own products over everyone else’s. Sound familiar? It should. The EU passed almost exactly this law back in 2022, the Digital Markets Act. Britain and Japan have built their own versions, and others are following suit.
This was never a transatlantic quarrel. It is a story about a handful of enormous platforms and the thousands of small, innovative companies, middle tech, that compete against them every day. And it is playing out in almost identical terms on every continent that has looked closely at the problem.
A Bill Washington Keeps Rewriting
AICOA is narrowly targeted. It applies only to platforms controlled by a company with at least 175 billion dollars in annual revenue and a user base reaching more than a third of the American population. That makes for a very short list. Google is on it.
The bill’s idea is simple. A platform that competes in the markets it ranks should not be allowed to tilt the scales in its own favour. For search engines, that means no more burying a rival’s flight comparison tool beneath the platform’s own flight widget. For travellers, it is the difference between seeing the best option and seeing the platform’s own option.
We have seen this debate before. A version of AICOA passed the Senate Judiciary Committee in January 2022 by 16 votes to 6, a rare bipartisan feat, only to die without a floor vote. It came back in 2023, and now it has returned again in 2026. Ideas that keep returning usually do so for a reason.
The Same Diagnosis on Every Continent
Here is what the Washington versus Brussels narrative misses. The European Commission has already found that Google’s own travel, shopping and transport results are placed more prominently than anyone else’s. Britain’s competition authority reached a similar conclusion this year and ordered Google to rank organic results using objective, non-discriminatory criteria, its own version of a self-preferencing rule. South Korea’s competition authority studied the effect directly and found that an artificially favoured ranking lifted purchases of a platform’s own product by roughly a third, while cutting purchases of the top-ranked rival by almost as much. Japan has just written self-preferencing prohibitions into law covering app stores, browsers and, notably, search engines.
When regulators on opposite sides of the world reach the same conclusion using entirely different methods, that tends to mean the problem is real.
What This Actually Costs a Traveller
None of this is abstract for our sector. Ask a hotel metasearch company how its share of Google’s traffic has moved over the past decade and you will hear the same story everywhere: the share of hotels relying on Google’s own hotel box went from roughly a third to four out of five in ten years. Ask a flight comparison service how often its own prices beat Google’s, and in the United Kingdom, Skyscanner found it beat Google Flights on price close to three quarters of the time, even as Google’s own widget kept appearing above the organic results anyway.
That is the quiet cost of self-preferencing: travellers who rarely see the cheapest option, because it is hidden underneath the platform’s own promoted content.
Middle Tech Is Not Asking for Favours
I want to be precise about what we are asking for, because its important. Nobody is asking regulators to pick winners. We are asking them to stop a company that ranks the market it competes in from tilting that ranking to benefit its own products, to the detriment of its biggest rivals.
That is not a European instinct, nor an American one. It is simply fairness, and fairness tends to look the same everywhere once you strip away the flags. The travel companies losing out to self-preferencing, in Brussels, in London, in Seoul, in Washington, are not asking Google to disappear. They are asking to compete on the same page, with the same terms. Maybe that is the real story here. Not a rivalry between two regulatory philosophies, but a global agreement that a marketplace only works when the company making the rules does not also get to bend them in its own favour.