Press Statement

Statement From Teri Olle on the Importance of Protecting Competition in the Digital Economy With New Legislation

04. 14. 2026

Teri Olle, Vice President of Economic Security California Action, in Sacramento to testify in support SB 1074

Sacramento, CA – Teri Olle, Vice President of Economic Security California Action (ESCAA), testified in Sacramento before the Senate Judiciary Committee in support of SB 1074 (Wiener), the BASED (Blocking Anticompetitive Self-Preferencing by Entrenched Dominant Platforms) Act. The legislation would ban self-preferencing, a practice Big Tech companies use to unfairly promote their products and services ahead of others on digital platforms. The bill passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee by a vote of 8-1 and now goes to the Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies, and Consumer Protection Committee. 

Teri Olle, Vice President, Economic Security California Action, a co-sponsor of the bill, issued the following statement following the hearing:

A central tenet of a free market economy is competition. It’s an ecosystem where rivals vie for our business. On a fair playing field, merit matters: if a product or service is better, it wins. That’s how it should work. But in today’s tech sector, a handful of giants own the field, and now act as gatekeepers, stifling innovation and reducing choice for everyone. They manipulate search results, harvest competitors’ data, and block business users and consumers from taking their own information elsewhere. This is self-preferencing, and it is rigging the market at the expense of consumers, startups, and small businesses across California.

When competition is suppressed, prices go up, quality goes down, and the next great California company never gets off the ground.  SB 1074 would make it clear that self-preferencing by a few trillion-dollar Big Tech companies to unfairly place themselves above competitors is no longer allowed.  If your product is genuinely better, you can win in the marketplace. But you do not get to own the infrastructure and use it to smother your competition. Economic Security California Action is proud to co-sponsor SB 1074 alongside Y Combinator, and we appreciate Senator Wiener’s leadership on this issue. We look forward to seeing the bill progress.