A bill to toughen America’s anti-ticket-bot law has cleared its committee stage in the US House of Representatives.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 36-0 on Wednesday (September 16) to report the MAIN Event Ticketing Act to the full House, as amended.
The bill, formally the Mitigating Automated Internet Networks for Event Ticketing Act, would amend the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016 – one of the laws the Federal Trade Commission is using to sue Live Nation and Ticketmaster.
The ticketing bill was one of 16 advanced at Wednesday’s markup, according to the committee, which recorded the roll call on H.R. 2713 as 36 yeas to 0 nays.
It is sponsored by Republican Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee, with Louisiana Democrat Troy Carter as original co-sponsor, and was introduced on April 8, 2025.
The text reported on Wednesday was amended: the committee adopted a substitute from Harshbarger that largely preserved the subcommittee’s version while clarifying its scope – including that a ticket issuer is not treated as owning or operating another company’s ticket-sales service merely because it links customers to it, according to TicketNews. That amended text has not yet been published.
Under the committee print taken up at the markup – the text as forwarded by the subcommittee on September 1 – a ticket issuer that owns or operates an online ticket-sales service would have to keep an access control system, security measure, or other technological control in place to enforce its posted purchase limits.
Those companies would also have to report to the FTC any incidents of circumvention they have actual knowledge of, no later than 30 days after discovery, and take reasonable steps to improve the systems that were circumvented.
The bill defines circumvention as avoiding, bypassing, removing, deactivating, or otherwise impairing an access control system, security measure, safeguard, or other technological control – and ties that definition specifically to the controls issuers would be required to maintain.
That anchor is what the secondary ticketing market is counting on: on its reading, breaking a seller’s posted rules would not by itself be a federal violation unless the technology enforcing them was defeated. The text stops short of settling the point. The new prohibition covers automated applications used “in circumvention of posted online ticket purchasing order rules,” with defeating a technological control offered as an example rather than a limit.
The bill would also set minimum civil penalties: not less than USD $10,000 for each day a violation occurs or continues, plus not less than $1,000 per violation.
Intentional violations would carry a further minimum of $10,000 each, while the FTC would have 180 days from enactment to open a public website for reporting ticket issuers that fall short of those duties, and a year to publish compliance guidance. The agency would share both those complaints and issuers’ reports with state attorneys general, as appropriate.
“The MAIN Event Ticketing Act builds on our prior work by cracking down on the bots and bad actors that have made buying a concert ticket feel like a rigged game,” said Gus Bilirakis, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade, in his opening statement at the September 1 subcommittee markup that sent the bill to the full committee by voice vote.
Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie did not single out the ticketing bill, saying of the markup as a whole: “The bills we advanced today equip American consumers and businesses to confidently make use of the technologies we need to lead the 21st Century. From the outset of the 119th Congress, we have prioritized setting a policy course that will ensure American global leadership for the next 250 years.
“Today’s bills continue that work so every American can fully and safely enjoy the benefits of this era of innovation.”
Live Nation has thrown its weight behind the legislation, as MBW reported in October 2025.
That support sits alongside the company’s own defense: the FTC and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster in September 2025, alleging the ticketing firm let brokers breach its own purchase limits and profited when those tickets were resold.
In an October 2025 letter to Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján, Dan Wall, Live Nation’s EVP for Corporate and Regulatory Affairs, called the collusion allegation “categorically false.”
Wall also warned the senators that the bill’s reporting duty could prove unworkable, writing that attempted circumvention “happens constantly and at enormous scale.”
The Coalition for Ticket Fairness, which lobbies on behalf of the secondary ticketing market, welcomed the vote in a statement sent to MBW after the markup.
“The Coalition for Ticket Fairness supports strong enforcement of the BOTS Act and legislation that targets automated ticket fraud,” said Geoff Vetter, spokesperson for the coalition. “Bad actors who use bots to unfairly scoop up tickets and restrict consumer choice should be held accountable, and we commend the Committee for prioritizing this issue.”
“Bad actors who use bots to unfairly scoop up tickets and restrict consumer choice should be held accountable, and we commend the Committee for prioritizing this issue.”
Geoff Vetter, Coalition for Ticket Fairness
He added: “Our message to Congress is simple: stop illegal bot activity and fraud, but don’t hand more power to the monopoly that already controls most of the market. We’ll keep working with lawmakers in the House and Senate to get this balance right, while preserving fair competition and consumer choice.”
The reach of the BOTS Act is already being tested in court: in April this year, Chief US District Judge George L. Russell III in Maryland refused to dismiss the FTC’s separate case against ticket broker Key Investment Group, ruling the statute reaches “any person” rather than bots alone. The ruling let that case proceed; it did not decide the merits.
Live Nation says its own case was brought under a different subparagraph of the BOTS Act, and argues the decision in fact strengthens its bid for dismissal, noting that the Maryland court described Ticketmaster as the party whose security measures were bypassed. The court has yet to rule on that motion.
H.R. 2713 must still pass on the House floor, and no date has been set.
The Senate version came first: S. 196, introduced by Blackburn and Luján in January 2025, was advanced by the Senate Commerce Committee that April and placed on the Senate Legislative Calendar that September, but has yet to be voted on by the full Senate.
Both senators have also taken sides in the litigation, filing an amicus brief against Key Investment Group’s dismissal bid and joining a brief supporting the FTC against Live Nation – leaving the company backing legislation whose Senate version was written by two of its courtroom opponents.
The queue in the Senate is already long. The TICKET Act, H.R. 1402 – the other ticketing bill from Bilirakis, written with Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky – passed the House 409-15 in April 2025 and was placed on the Senate calendar on September 16, 2025: a year to the day before Wednesday’s vote.
That bill mandates all-in pricing and bans speculative ticketing, subject to an exception for services that obtain tickets on a buyer’s behalf – the “concierge service” carveout that venue and artist groups call a loophole. Closing it is among the changes the Fix the Tix coalition, led by the National Independent Venue Association, pressed on the Senate Commerce Committee in March this year, alongside a ban on resale above a ticket’s original total cost and a 10% cap on resale fees.
That letter concerned S. 281, the Senate’s own version of the TICKET Act, which Senate Commerce ordered reported in February 2025 and which was placed on the Senate calendar that April. H.R. 1402, S. 196, and S. 281 all sit there; none has been scheduled for a floor vote.Music Business Worldwide
