Sec. 2. Findings; Sense of Congress

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Congress makes the following findings: The Bureau of Industry and Security maintains a regularly updated Entity List of foreign persons (set forth in Supplement No. 4 to part 744 of the Export Administration Regulations), including businesses, research institutions, government organizations, private organizations, individuals, and other types of legal persons, that are subject to specific license requirements for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer of specified items.

In recent years, the number of listed foreign persons has grown significantly, and now includes private consumer companies that are not producers of traditional military or national security products. Monopoly licenses have inadvertently been issued over the last few years, in some cases granting an exclusive right for a single company to sell a specific product to an entity on the Entity List without consideration of the market distorting impacts of these monopolies. The issuance of monopoly licenses creates the appearance that the Bureau of Industry and Security favors some companies at the expense of others, undermining the credibility of the bureau and undercutting the ability of the United States Government to work with the governments of allies and partners to build a shared regulatory infrastructure to control sensitive commercial technology.

Monopoly licenses have the potential to create serious distortion in the market, exacerbate economic and security vulnerabilities, and undermine fairness in the export licensing regime administered by the Bureau of Industry and Security. It is the sense of Congress that the Department of Commerce would be well-served by a requirement that the Bureau of Industry and Security coordinate with the International Trade Administration to conduct a competitive market review when evaluating a request for a license to determine whether issuing the license would result in a single applicant having the sole license for the export, reexport, or in-country transfer of an article to similarly situated end users.