The two biggest antitrust bills in more than 50 years are dead after they were not included in year-end congressional spending legislation released Tuesday, angering anti-monopolists who believe Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-N.Y.) killed the best chance for this Congress to meaningfully limit corporate power.

While a pair of smaller provisions in the omnibus will help antitrust advocates take on the nation’s largest tech companies in the future, the death of the Open App Markets Act and the American Innovation and Choice Online Act — both of which had the necessary support to pass the Senate, advocates insist — amounts to a massive win for Big Tech’s well-funded lobbying and influence machine.

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“Big Tech, Big Ag and Big Pharma spent extraordinary sums in an unprecedented effort to keep Congress from delivering on antitrust reform and undermine the ability of state and federal enforcers to uphold the law — and they lost,” said Sarah Miller, the executive director of the antitrust-focused American Economic Liberties Project. She noted that the filing fee hike would be the first congressional action to strengthen antitrust enforcement since 1976.

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