[srinivasan]

It's a false premise that startups are currently competing against large companies like Microsoft for H-1B visas.

The biggest H-1B users are offshoring/outsourcing companies (source: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...)

Moving to an auction system will in fact improve a startup's chances - most VC funded startups can comfortably outbid an outsourcing company. The outsourcers' business models are dependent on visa costs being on the low side.

[boulos]

Wow! Thanks for this link. For those that didn't click through: all the big tech firms combined only took about 5000 of the 85000 H1-B applications in 2014. Tata/Wipro/Infosys etc. each took more than 3000 a piece (Tata alone did more than all the big tech firms combined).

Still it seems like an auction isn't necessary, just a higher fixed fee upon selection. If it was say $10k, that's a pretty big chunk of the $45k to $90k that PayScale reports for software engineers at Tata Consultancy Services.