[munfred]

I'm every bit as surprised as you. I don't think it's a significant fraction of congress though, I think it's specifically senator Mark Warner. He did work with tech before, and my take is that he knows what he is talking about and was waiting for a good political moment to present such unpalatable proposals (unpalatable to the tech companies, that is).

See his Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Warner#Early_life,_educat...

Last year he (meaning, most likely his staff under his supervision) put out a "whitepaper" outlining 20 possible proposals to regulate social media and tech companies. Notably, 4 of the things discussed were introduced as bills in one form or another.

I posted about them last year, see the discussion and links here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21389809