The 2024 state legislative session saw six state legislatures — Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, New York, and Washington — introduce competition-related legislation, continuing the trend of states attempting to tackle policy typically addressed at the federal level. State legislatures primarily focused their efforts around revisions to state antitrust laws, focusing on monopolization practices and monopsonies. Additionally, states considered legislation that would implement merger notification requirements and raise penalties for violations of antitrust laws. Of the fifteen pieces of competition-related legislation that were introduced during the 2024 session, only two bills made it through the legislative process, Maine’s LD 1815 and Washington’s H.B. 2072. Both bills amended their respective state’s existing penalties for current competition-related violations.
Market Power
The largest number of competition-related bills introduced in this session aimed to address market power practices. States such as Minnesota and New York introduced legislation aiming to replicate European-style law. These bills attempted to tackle price discrimination practices, set steep requirements for mergers and acquisitions reporting, and sought to prevent monopolies, as well as creating commissions to debate further alterations to the law. These pieces of legislation would likely deter pro-competitive business activity via significant compliance challenges and exorbitant penalties, and hurt the innovation ecosystem by clouding the sector with uncertainty.
Competition-Related Studies
The 2024 legislative session also saw several states look to further efforts to study potential needs for additional competition-related legislation or to modify existing statutes. California’s Law Revision Commission continued its Antitrust Study work, while the Maryland legislature advanced a bill (H.B. 53) that would have created a Commission to study e-commerce monopolies in the state. Both of these efforts establish artificial parameters to their examination, such as looking solely at certain industries (like technology companies or e-commerce). These types of studies may diverge from common consumer-focused examinations and arbitrarily pit competitors who conduct the same business via different methods against one another and encourage the government to choose winners and losers.
Looking Towards 2025
As most states throughout the country will begin a new two-year legislative session in 2025, the majority of competition-related bills introduced in 2024 will have to completely restart the legislative process. That said, it remains likely that competition policy will remain a point of focus for legislators in places like New York and Minnesota. Additionally, with the recent litigation at the federal level that has received notable attention throughout the year, there is the potential for additional states to join the policy conversation at the start of the new legislative session.
For more information about state competition legislation trends from 2024 and leading into 2025, see CCIA’s 2024 state competition landscape.