Concert ticket bot bill clears a House committee as Live Nation fights the same law

A bill to toughen America's anti-ticket-bot law has cleared its committee stage, and the company with most to lose from it is one of its supporters. The House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 36-0 on Wednesday 16 September to report the MAIN Event Ticketing Act to the full House, one of 16 bills advanced at the same markup. Live Nation, whose Ticketmaster arm is being sued under the statute the bill would strengthen, has publicly backed the legislation since October 2025.

The bill's formal name is the Mitigating Automated Internet Networks for Event Ticketing Act, and it amends the Better Online Ticket Sales Act of 2016. Republican Diana Harshbarger of Tennessee sponsors it, with Louisiana Democrat Troy Carter as original co-sponsor; it was introduced on 8 April 2025 and carries the number H.R. 2713.

Under the text taken up at the markup, a ticket issuer running its own online sales service would have to keep a working technological control in place to enforce whatever purchase limits it posts. It would have to tell the FTC about any circumvention it actually knows of within 30 days, and take reasonable steps to fix whatever was bypassed.

The definition of circumvention is where the money is. The bill ties it to defeating an access control, a security measure or another technological safeguard, which is the reading the resale market wants: on that reading, simply breaking a seller's posted rules would not be a federal violation on its own. The text does not settle the point, since the new prohibition covers automated applications used in circumvention of posted purchase rules with a defeated control offered as an example rather than a ceiling.

Penalties would be substantial. The bill sets a floor of $10,000 for each day a violation runs plus at least $1,000 per violation, with a further $10,000 minimum for intentional breaches. The FTC would get 180 days from enactment to open a public complaint website and a year to publish compliance guidance, sharing both complaints and issuers' own reports with state attorneys general.

The litigation running underneath all this is not settled either. The FTC and seven states sued Live Nation and Ticketmaster in September 2025, alleging the company let brokers break its own purchase limits and profited when the tickets were resold. Dan Wall, Live Nation's EVP for corporate and regulatory affairs, called the collusion allegation categorically false in a letter to senators and warned that the reporting duty would be unworkable because attempted circumvention happens constantly.

The Coalition for Ticket Fairness, which lobbies for the resale market, welcomed the vote while drawing a line. Spokesperson Geoff Vetter told MBW that bad actors using bots should be held accountable, then added that Congress should not hand more power to the company that already controls most of the market.

Whether any of it becomes law is another matter. H.R. 2713 still needs a floor vote and no date has been set. The Senate version, S. 196, was introduced by Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Lujan in January 2025 and placed on the Senate calendar that September without a vote since, leaving Live Nation backing a bill whose Senate text was written by two of its courtroom opponents. The TICKET Act, which passed the House 409-15, has been waiting in the same queue for a year.

Our coverage of the surrounding fights includes Live Nation resisting disclosure on its DOJ settlement and StubHub spending millions against a US resale price cap, and a California resale cap dying in committee.