A US bill that would force online ticket sellers to report every successful bot attack to the Federal Trade Commission cleared a House subcommittee this week, and its Senate twin is already waiting on the calendar. The MAIN Event Ticketing Act does not ban bots, because the BOTS Act did that in 2016. It makes the people who got beaten by one admit it, in writing, to a regulator.
What moved this week
The House version, H.R. 2713, was introduced in April 2025 by Representatives Diana Harshbarger and Troy Carter and advanced out of the Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade Subcommittee by voice vote, according to TheTicketingBusiness and CelebrityAccess. The Senate version, S. 196, sponsored by Senators Marsha Blackburn and Ben Ray Luján, cleared the Senate Commerce Committee last year and has sat on the Senate legislative calendar since September 2025, per the official bill status. The two texts are identical, which is why the National Independent Venue Association is now asking Congress to finish the job.
The full name is the Mitigating Automated Internet Networks for Event Ticketing Act, which is the kind of acronym that only survives because nobody reads it twice.
What the bill actually does
The Congressional Research Service summary is short. The bill prohibits using software that performs automated tasks to buy tickets in a way that circumvents a seller's posted purchasing rules, including anything that defeats access controls or security measures. It then puts three duties on online ticket sellers: maintain reasonable administrative, technical and physical safeguards for the security and availability of the sales site; report known incidents of circumvention to the FTC; and take reasonable steps to address them. The FTC gets civil penalties and the power to sue, federal and state law enforcement are told to share what they know about attacks on ticketing sites, consumers get a direct route to report suspected violations, and the Commission has to tell Congress how enforcement is going.
NIVA, which has lobbied for the bill, frames it as a fix for a law that had teeth but no eyes. Its executive director Stephen Parker said Congress has an opportunity to deliver resale reform with support from independent stages, nonprofits and fans, and that the bill has momentum in both chambers. NIVA is simultaneously asking California's governor to veto AB 1349, the state's speculative ticket ban, arguing late amendments shifted liability onto venues and away from resale marketplaces.
What this means for event organisers
Read the duties again and notice who they land on: the online ticket seller. For most conference and trade show organisers that is not you, it is the platform running your checkout, and the platform is the one that will have to build safeguards, log circumvention attempts and file with the FTC. Expect that obligation to show up in your terms of service, in your platform's security questionnaire and, on some platforms, in your bill.
It also changes what you should ask at procurement. Event registration security used to be a soft question. Now there are hard ones: does the platform enforce ticket limits per customer, does it run a virtual queue or waiting room for onsales, does it detect and block automated purchasing, and will it tell you when it has been hit? A platform that already does all four will pass a MAIN Event audit without noticing. A platform that does none is about to acquire a compliance project, and compliance projects have a habit of being paid for by customers.
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The BOTS Act made cheating illegal. This bill makes getting cheated reportable, and the report lands on whoever runs the checkout.
One more distinction worth making while everyone is talking about limits. A ticket limit per buyer is a rule you set to protect the event. A ceiling on how many tickets or registrations you can sell before the price tier changes is a rule your platform sets to protect its revenue. The first is good practice and about to be encouraged by federal law. The second is a business model, and it is the one to interrogate when the price is the same whether you sell 500 tickets or 50,000. That is the unlimited model in one sentence, and it has nothing to do with bots.
Ten years of the BOTS Act, in three enforcement actions
The Better Online Ticket Sales Act became law in December 2016 and was barely used for four years. The FTC's first cases arrived in January 2021, when three New York brokers agreed to pay a combined $3.7 million for using bots and hundreds of accounts to beat purchase limits. The next headline case took until August 2026, when broker Elite Events settled for $300,000 over the same tactics. That is two enforcement moments in a decade, which is the gap the MAIN Event bill is trying to close: without a reporting duty, the regulator only knows about attacks that leak.
The UK got here by a different route. Bots that breach purchase limits have been a criminal offence since 2018 under regulations made under the Digital Economy Act, though enforcement has been similarly thin. What neither country has yet is a reliable count of how often bots win, and a reporting requirement is the only way to get one. Whatever else the bill achieves, it would produce data.
What to do now
Nothing dramatic. The bill still needs a full committee vote, a floor vote in each chamber and a signature, and Congress has a long record of ticketing bills that advance and then do not. But the direction of travel is clear on both sides of the Atlantic, and the cheapest time to ask your ticketing platform how it handles purchase limits, queues and bot detection is before a law makes the answer a matter of record. If the answer is a shrug, you know what the next procurement question is.
eventcloud runs ticket sales through your own Stripe account, so the checkout and the buyer records are yours rather than a marketplace's, and the registration form is where your purchase rules live. What a platform must file with the FTC, if the bill passes, is a question every platform, ours included, will be answering in 2027.
