California Tech & Antitrust Radar: COMPETE Act, Tax on Billionaires, and Journalism Jobs
Yours truly is now a California resident. Out of a very packed legislative scene, here's my top three policy initiatives from California you should all know for your tech and competition discussions.
California is kicking off July with a packed agenda of legislative topics whose fate will be decided in the coming weeks.
But first, a personal note to frame this post: After 6 years of wonderful friendships and career milestones in D.C., I moved to California’s Bay Area (rock on East Bay!) in November 2025 (with my first child still in my belly). My husband, a California native from Richmond, and I had been planning this move for a while, but hadn’t super made up our minds until we learned I was pregnant. It’s been great: we’re closer to family, and our son is thriving in cooler weather compared to the East coast. I’m now back from maternity leave at Open Markets’ Center for Media & Digital Governance. I’ll use this space to occasionally highlight legislative initiatives and events in California as I deem them relevant for broader tech and policy debates in the U.S. and abroad.
From a national news perspective, California has been making headlines as their authorities, ranging from governor Gavin Newsom, the state Attorney General Rob Bonta, or Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass, have positioned themselves as challengers to the Trump administration’s various economic and social policies — including his abuse of power to retaliate against those he sees as his enemies.
But the concrete work of how California is making strides in resisting an increasingly authoritarian U.S. president, and helping other states make similar moves along the way, deserves closer attention. So, here’s my attempt to do just that.
I’ve picked three topics—two of them, very much on the news currently, while the third one is somewhat underreported—to keep an eye on:
The COMPETE Act’s big Senate Hearing on June 30
Short names for bills can be somewhat complicated and funny, but this one is really on point. AB-1776, or the Competition and Opportunity in Markets for a Prosperous, Equitable and Transparent Economy (COMPETE) Act, is one potentially for the history books. If passed by the Senate, it would make a big statement on California’s leadership in keeping antitrust enforcement alive in the U.S.
The COMPETE Act sets to modernize the state’s antitrust law, the Cartwright Act. It does so mainly by expanding the type of firms that can be prosecuted for antitrust violations, and by reinforcing California courts’ independence from federal court precedent that weakens the promotion of competition as it already exists under state law — codified to protect “all trade participants, including workers and consumers.”
The COMPETE Act passed the California Assembly last May. Tomorrow, June 30, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing for legislators to decide whether the bill will make it to a full Senate vote before the end of August—which is the deadline to present bills for Governor Newsom to sign into law this year.
Capitol Forum (paywalled) and The American Prospect have both recently published the ins and outs of what it would take for the bill to get out of Judiciary Committee. Their conclusion? That however key committee members will vote is anyone’s guess.
Big Business is Furious
Introduced by assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, the COMPETE Act follows a unanimous recommendation by the California Law Review Commission, based on at least three years worth of studies and public consultations, that antitrust laws in the state need updating. What does COMPETE want to target? The business conduct that consolidates markets, which in turns makes all kinds of products and services more expensive, reduces job opportunities (as the pool of employers shrinks, they have less incentives to compete for our talent), and blocks small businesses from growing in a level playing field.
Disclosure: My employer, Open Markets Institute, is among the several civil society organizations that publicly support the COMPETE Act.
One key change is that it would prohibit monopolistic tactics by “single” firms. This is an important and practical addition to the Cartwright Act, which allows prosecution of anticompetitive practices if done by two or more firms (e.g. conspiring to monopolize markets). In practical terms, it would enable California to bring forward cases under state law for conduct that the federal government has already sued many corporations for, such as Google (search and digital advertising), Apple, or Tickemaster-Live Nation.
The proposal has made big business representatives, and various think tanks pro-status quo in antitrust enforcement, go into full rage mode. They’ve called the bill an attempt to “Europeanize” California’s antitrust law, a “radical” and impractical way to make Californians’ lives more affordable, among other expletives. Major opponents leading the charge against it are the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (such a surprise, huh?) and CalChamber (which receives major funding from Google, Apple, Amazon, and Meta)
Here I just want to call your attention on one thing: the COMPETE Act is not proposing anything foreign or radical. Not only does the deeply American Sherman Act allow for prosecution of single firms breaking antitrust law, but forty five other states have this exact approach in their state laws. In fact, increasing concern among Americans that current antitrust laws should be improved has already led many states to pass new laws in that direction.
For example, Colorado amended its 1992 Antitrust Act in 2023 to expand the state attorney general investigative powers, increase penalties, and expand liability to third parties that aid and abet antitrust violations. Washington amended its antitrust law in 2024 to significantly increase penalties. In 2023, Minnesota passed a new law regulating healthcare mergers, expanding the state attorney general’s oversight power. Minnesota’s new law was so significant that it was used that same year to stop the merger between Fairview Health Services and Sandford Health in Minneapolis.
Check out Tech Oversight California’s great work in making the case for the COMPETE Act. The American Economics Liberty Project also has a good break-down of the bill’s benefits in this press release.
As much as opponents of the bill have attempted to portray that Americans are perfectly happy with the monopolies that capture every aspect of our lives, or that the bill is so radically new that “uncertainty” will cripple the state’s economy (supposedly represented solely by Silicon Valley), there is no denying in the mounting support behind the bill—to the dismay of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (something we can all relish a little bit in).
What to watch for in the coming days? Besides the result of tomorrow’s hearing, we have yet to learn whether Attorney General Rob Bonta and Governor Newsom support the bill.
Tax on Billionaires Proposal Headed to the November Ballots
Another hot topic that caught my attention almost immediately after I landed in my new home was the 5% one-time tax ballot proposal on California’s billionaires. The initiative, led by the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West (SEIU-UHW), is a response to the federal government’s gutting funding to California’s healthcare services and other assistance programs.
The 2026 Billionaires Tax Act seeks to impose a one-time, 5% levy on California residents whose net worth is over $1 billion. According the bill draft, the state has 200 billionaires that collectively represent $2 trillion in wealth, who pay only—brace yourself—less than 1.5% of their wealth in annual taxes (federal, state, and local). This clearly happens, in part, because most accumulation of wealth for these people are in assets such as stock, real estate, and businesses, which are only taxed at sale (and, well, they don’t sell).
If we consider only a billionaire’s income, national-level studies of the U.S. tax system show that there is still a huge imbalance: billionaires pay about 24% of their income in taxes, while the rest of us pay 30% (of our five- to six-figure annual incomes). This gap amount to an average tax payer giving away a 25% larger share of their income compared to billionaires.
A first test of ‘anti-billionaire’ sentiment
The collected tax, estimated in $100 billion per its proponents, would fund particularly Medi-Cal, which is projected to lose $19 billion in federal funding and at least $8 billion in state funding annually, as well as public education and food assistance programs. Dave Regan, the SEIU-UHW leader behind the proposal, took the fight for this measure to make it to the November ballots against the advice of other unions (such as the California Medical Association and the California School Boards Association) and the governor, who all warned him it would backfire.
But surprise, surprise: the proposal finally did qualify for the ballots, after more than 1.6 million firms were collected in support of it. Last week it was finally clear that the measure would definitely be put under referendum on November 3, 2026. So, what’s next? POLITICO summed up pretty well what lies ahead:
“The proposed levy, which proponents refused to withdraw from the ballot by Thursday’s deadline, has prompted Silicon Valley players like [Sergey] Brin to pour millions of dollars into advancing rival ballot measures and shaping the state Legislature. Ultra-wealthy opponents are now poised to unleash enormous sums to defeat the wealth tax.”
Governor Newsom has also joined the campaign against the proposal. In a long Substack post, he explained his reasons, which I would roughly summarize as 1) too much money will be collected for only a few sectors hit by lack of federal and state funding, leaving other equally important things such as childcare, housing, or higher education unattended, 2) this is too short-sighted and will make the California budget good for a bit but unstable in the long run, and 3) this is a good idea but it should be national, and we need many other changes too, like banning billionaires’ ability to borrow money against their stock portfolios.
In any case, not a fundamental disagreement with the principle behind it: that Americans seem to have reached a tipping point in their tolerance of unrestricted wealth accumulation and the political power that it buys for a few handful of people.
We’ll see what happens in November. Of course, without coordinated support that offsets in some way how much the opposition will outspend supporters, this may go nowhere. Even if one may see some good arguments in Newsom’s opposition, the referendum on the Billionaires Tax Act is not a fight about the stability of the state budget anymore (and why this budget is unstable deserves its own share of accountability from the governor). It will be a test of how much average Americans—as roughly 1 out of 8 Americans lives in California—may be ready to take back the power they’ve lost to a handful of billionaires deciding their fate.
Tax credits for journalism jobs passes California Assembly
This one I owe knowing thanks to Rebuild Local News’ Matt Pearce, whose updates on Substack and LinkedIn are really worth following if you’re interested in the future of local media, and also of journalism as a whole in this era of Big Tech platforms and their AI takeover.
AB 2222, the Community NEWS Act, has quietly been making its way through the California Legislature, and it’s worth following its fate in the next few months. Authored by Assemblymember Christopher M. Ward, the Community NEWS Act essentially proposes to make it less expensive to retain and hire journalist by granting two types of tax credit to non-profit newsrooms: a job retention credit worth up to $20,000 per journalist for up to five employees, with $15,000 granted per additional hire; and a $15,000 credit for new hires.
At the end of May, the bill passed the state Assembly with a 63-10 bipartisan vote. Last week, the bill passed the Senate Revenue and Taxation Committee with 4-0 vote, so it’s now headed to the Senate Appropriations Committee. Until the bill actually makes it to a Senate floor vote, as Matt says, “there’s still work to be done, and nothing can ever be taken for granted in the world of politics. But the path forward is getting built rock by rock.”
Following similar measures in New York, New Mexico, and Illinois, the proposal would benefit local print, digital, and broadcast outlets regardless of whether they are for-profit businesses, 501(c)3 nonprofits or sole proprietorships, Matt explained in his testimony to the state Assembly. He also shared some quite stunning numbers of the dire situation that journalism jobs face in California:
In 2002, the U.S. employed roughly 40 full‑time local journalists per 100,000 residents. Since then, California has lost nearly 34 journalists per 100,000 residents. California has an estimated 2,386 full‑time local journalists left — just over six per 100,000 residents — ranking 42nd out of all 50 states in the nation [per the the Local Journalist Index].
With some much going on, AB 2222 has been a somewhat underreported initiative. But it seems very promising and worth watching unfold in the Senate. It would be no minor feat that California codifies support for journalism jobs, specially after how Google and the governor torpedoed the California Journalism Preservation Act (which also included specific clauses to direct resources for journalists’ retention), despite that act having wide support from journalism unions and associations.
I’ll try to put this Tech & Antitrust Radar together every quarter! This time it was a California edition. Next time it might be national or a combination of both.