The Biden Administration criticized Google and Apple as having undue influence over mobile app stores and called for Congress to pass legislation that would under cut their "gatekeeper" status, the latest sign of anti-Big Tech positioning by the White House.

The Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration released a report on Wednesday making the case for antitrust tech legislation. The report, titled "Competition in the Mobile Application Ecosystem," examined the prominence of the Apple and Google app stores and noted their approaches to transparency, security, and data collection. The report then called on Congress to pass legislation to rein in their powers over the online market.

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"We're looking forward to seeing what legislation gets introduced on Capitol Hill. ... Our hope is that this analysis can inform how people are thinking about these issues," NTIA administrator Alan Davidson told reporters.

NTIA recommended that Congress increase resources to antitrust regulators like the Federal Trade Commission, that it take action to allow the use of third-party app stores, and that it limits or removes restrictions on sideloading, which is the downloading of apps from alternative app markets.

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The report echoed many of the concerns behind the Open App Markets Act, a bill introduced by Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) in the last Congress. The bill failed to pass after encountering major organized opposition from tech groups.

Tech advocates were critical of the report's conclusions and said it would benefit big companies like Google more than it would users or developers. "We agree with NTIA that the app market must be 'robust, open, innovative and secure,' but recommendations included in today's report would cause serious harm to Americans' data and privacy and have unintended consequences on our national security and global competitiveness," Linda Moore, the president of the tech lobbying group TechNet, said in a statement.