Dominant Digital Gateways & Fair Market Access
DOMINANT DIGITAL GATEWAYS & FAIR MARKET ACCESS
POSITION
A private company may operate its own business and enforce lawful safety, security, quality, and conduct rules. A dominant digital gateway should not use control over app distribution, payments, banking, cloud infrastructure, telecommunications, advertising access, or a major online marketplace to exclude an otherwise lawful person or business solely because of political, religious, or ideological viewpoint.
OUR PHILOSOPHY
Free enterprise requires real access to the market. A company that controls a practical gateway between lawful businesses and millions of customers occupies a different position from an ordinary local business with many substitutes. Market power must not become private permission to participate in the economy. At the same time, government should not force a newspaper, speaker, or expressive feed to endorse a message. Policy should regulate bottleneck access, discrimination, competition, notice, and due process without pretending every private platform is the government.
COVERED DOMINANT GATEWAYS
The Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice, and relevant sector regulator should designate a covered dominant gateway through a public proceeding. Designation must examine:
share of the relevant United States market;
number of consumers and businesses dependent on the service;
control over an operating system, app store, payment rail, identity system, cloud service, communications network, advertising exchange, or marketplace needed to reach customers;
switching costs, network effects, contractual restraints, technical barriers, and the availability of realistic substitutes;
ability to impose terms without meaningful negotiation;
whether exclusion from the service materially blocks participation in a lawful interstate market.
Designation lasts three years and must then be renewed, narrowed, or ended using current evidence. A company may appeal designation to a federal court on an expedited record.
VIEWPOINT-NEUTRAL MARKET ACCESS
A covered gateway must publish objective eligibility, safety, security, technical, financial, and conduct rules in plain language.
Comparable applicants and customers must receive comparable review, access, pricing, ranking rules, payment timing, and enforcement regardless of lawful political or religious viewpoint.
An app may not be rejected merely because the company dislikes its lawful political content, publisher, users, or viewpoint.
A bank or payment processor may manage genuine credit, fraud, sanctions, anti-money-laundering, operational, and reputational risks tied to documented conduct. It may not use a vague reputation label as a substitute for evidence simply because lawful customers are politically unpopular.
A cloud, domain, telecommunications, or infrastructure provider may act against malware, attacks, illegal services, nonpayment, abuse of the provider's systems, or a concrete security threat. It may not secretly enforce a political blacklist unrelated to those risks.
APP STORE & SOFTWARE DISTRIBUTION RULES
A complete app submission should receive an initial decision within 30 calendar days.
Rejection must identify the exact published rule, the material facts, the correction available, and whether the same rule applies to the gateway's own competing app.
A dominant operating-system provider must permit a reasonably safe alternative method of installing lawful software when its own store denies access, subject to neutral security controls and clear user warnings.
A gateway may not require an app to buy unrelated services, surrender ownership, suppress lawful criticism of the gateway, or use the gateway's payment system when another secure method can satisfy the same legitimate consumer-protection standard.
Security review may examine code, permissions, privacy, fraud, malware, age restrictions, and technical compatibility. It may not become a disguised viewpoint test.
NOTICE, HUMAN REVIEW & APPEAL
Before suspension or termination, a covered gateway must ordinarily provide written notice, the rule and evidence relied upon, and at least 10 calendar days to correct or respond.
Immediate temporary action is permitted for malware, active fraud, a credible threat, unlawful content, sanctions, serious data exposure, nonpayment, or another specific imminent harm. The gateway must provide an initial written reason within 24 hours.
A trained human who did not make the initial decision must decide an internal appeal within seven calendar days for a suspension and within 15 calendar days for other material restrictions.
Access should remain available during appeal unless the gateway documents why continued access presents an imminent legal, security, financial, or physical risk.
A business facing destruction of an operating market may seek expedited judicial or agency relief. A court should be able to order temporary access when the applicant is likely to succeed and delay would cause irreparable injury.
NO GOVERNMENT-BY-PROXY CENSORSHIP
Government may report crimes, cybersecurity threats, foreign operations, legal violations, and violations of a platform's published rules. It may not threaten regulation, prosecution, contracts, licenses, or other government power to induce a private gateway to punish lawful speech, commerce, association, or political opposition that government could not directly punish. Material government requests affecting an identified person, organization, app, account, or business must be logged and later disclosed, subject to narrowly defined investigative, privacy, and national-security delays.
EDITORIAL FREEDOM & UNLAWFUL CONTENT
This policy does not require a private speaker to endorse another person's message or prohibit an expressive service from exercising constitutionally protected editorial judgment. It focuses on nonexpressive gateway functions, access to essential commercial infrastructure, consistent enforcement, and competition. No service must carry or facilitate child exploitation, true threats, criminal solicitation, fraud, malware, intellectual-property theft, unlawful discrimination, or other illegal conduct.
ENFORCEMENT & REMEDIES
The FTC, Department of Justice, state attorneys general, and appropriate sector regulators should enforce these rules. A harmed person or business should be able to seek an injunction, restoration of access, correction of records, actual economic damages, attorney fees, and enhanced damages for a knowing or repeated violation. A covered gateway that falsifies reasons, destroys appeal evidence, or repeatedly violates final orders should face escalating civil penalties tied to the duration and scale of the violation.
Good-faith security action based on specific evidence should not create liability merely because the concern is later resolved in the customer's favor. Liability should turn on discrimination, inconsistency, lack of required process, knowing falsity, retaliation, or unreasonable refusal to correct a proven mistake.
WHAT WE WILL MEASURE
Covered gateways should report applications, approvals, rejections, suspensions, reasons, decision time, appeals, reversals, emergency actions, complaints of viewpoint discrimination, government requests, self-preferencing findings, market concentration, switching barriers, and compliance with final orders. Reports should protect user privacy and legitimate security details.
Core MPA standard: Google, Apple, a bank, a payment processor, a cloud company, or another dominant gateway should not be able to erase a lawful person or business from the market because powerful decision-makers dislike the person's politics. Enforce real rules equally. Give reasons. Provide an appeal. Preserve competition.
Related policies: Consumer Rights; Personal Rights & Freedoms; Workers' Rights; Digital Assets, Stablecoins & Financial Technology; Government Integrity & Equal Justice; Regulatory Reform & Administrative Due Process.
Status: Proposed / Draft, not yet formally adopted.
Originally published: September 27, 2026.
Last updated: September 27, 2026.
Version: Draft 0.1.