SIIA’s Opposition to SB 1154: California Preventing Algorithmic Collusion Act of 2024

The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) joins 9 organizations to express our opposition to SB 1154 (Hurtado). It is unnecessary, creates onerous reporting requirements, chills price competition by exposing businesses to significant uncertainty and aggressive liability, and imposes significant cost on all but the smallest of businesses using tools that fall under the bill’s definition of price algorithms. Alarmingly, the bill also grants the Attorney General (AG) authority to request reports detailing a business’s use of pricing algorithms for any reason, without regard to whether the business is alleged to have behaved anticompetitively or harmed consumers, and then permits the AG to share the report with a third party, NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology), to decipher the reported information.