A top California legislator is backing a proposed overhaul of the state’s antitrust laws, giving political heft to a bill rattling industries from Hollywood to Silicon Valley.
Assembly Majority Leader Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D) said Tuesday her bill would be “very similar” to a draft measure proposed by the California Law Revision Commission that would expand the state’s major antitrust law, the Cartwright Act, to cover anticompetitive business practices by individual companies. The proposal, approved by the nonpartisan panel last month after a years-long study, would amount to a significant extension of the law currently focused on the behavior by two ...