Alfred Ng

This does seem like easy pickings for Congress, right?

Because it hits on these two issues that are very salient right now, which is affordability and also regulating big tech.

And, you know, we've seen lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, talking about it being a big problem.

When it comes to legislative solutions, though, that really hasn't been quite the case yet.

Senator Ruben Gallego introduced a bill last week that would ban surveillance pricing.

But he has no co-sponsors on it.

He doesn't have any Republicans backing the bill or anything like that.

It's one Democrat that's proposed legislation on this.

It does seem like it would be a big win, you know, for somebody to get on this issue early.

I know that Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican, has actually criticized, you know, airline CEOs for this practice.

Well...

I think it really comes down to, you know, what is in the terms of the bill, right?

Because I know that a lot of lobbyists have worked against these kinds of surveillance pricing bills to say, you know, well, if you pass this legislation the way that it's written right now, we're not going to be able to offer military discounts or we're not going to be able to offer discounts to teachers or, you know, any of these discounts that like have existed for many years without algorithms suddenly,

are not able to exist if you ban, you know, setting prices based on people's personalized information.

So in New York, that bill was actually watered down from its original intent.

Originally, that bill was supposed to be an outright ban on surveillance pricing.

A lot of lobbying groups went against it, making the arguments that I mentioned earlier, saying, if you pass this, you're actually going to hurt people on affordability, where we can't use discounts, we can't offer discounts to people for frequent flying, we can't offer discounts to potential new customers who've never shopped with us before.

And it seemed to have worked because surveillance pricing, as you know, is still allowed in New York State.

All the law does is say that you have to tell people that they're doing this.

And even that disclosure law did have some challenges.