Montana Attorney General Tim Fox has joined 47 other state Attorneys General in filing an anti-trust lawsuit against tech giant Google. The Attorneys General from Puerto Rico and DC have also joined every state except Alabama and California in this possibly precedent setting case, one of the first major anti-trust cases ever brought against a tech industry that is extremely hard to regulate under current anti-trust laws that were designed before the creation of the Internet as it is today. The lawsuit is being led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton who says that the investigation will focus primarily on Google’s advertising and search business. Fox said in a statement regarding the suit, “I and other state Attorneys General are investigating because we have seen evidence that Google’s business practices may have undermined consumer choice, stifled innovation, compromised privacy, and put Google in control of the flow and dissemination of online information,” Fox said. “We are concerned that Google has achieved and maintained this through business practices designed to thwart competition and suppress alternatives to their products. We will investigate in an objective and fair-minded manner, with a focus on ensuring Americans have access to free markets in which companies compete on the merits of their products. If we identify illegal activities, we will take appropriate action.”
Past investigations of Google have uncovered violations ranging from advertising illegal drugs in the United States to now three antitrust actions brought by the European Commission. None of these previous investigations, however, fully address the source of Google’s sustained market power and the ability to engage in serial and repeated business practices with the intention to protect and maintain that power. According to the Washington Post, Google is expected to take in more than $48 billion in digital ad revenue this year in the U.S. alone and capture 75% of the total amount of spending on search ads in the United States. Paxton says that “they dominate the buyer side, the seller side, the auction side, and the video side with YouTube,” which is readily apparent to most people with access to the internet. Other Attorneys General have raised additional complaints about the tech giant, ranging from the way the company processes and ranks search results which has led to companies basically entering bidding wars to see who can spend the most money to get priority search ranking to the fact that Google has a track record of not fully protecting its users’ personal information, selling that information for profit and using it to target users with personalized ad content.
At this point in time, Google has a near complete monopolization of the search engine market and the internet video market through YouTube, not many people can even name another search engine and the phrase “Google it” has become synonymous for using a search engine. Open Markets Institute, an organization seeking to promote greater awareness of the political and economic dangers of monopolization, says about this suit, “We applaud the 50 state Attorneys General for taking this unprecedented stand against Big Tech by uniting to investigate Google’s destruction of competition in search and advertising. We haven’t seen a major monopolization case against a tech giant since Microsoft was sued in 1998. Today’s announcement marks the start of a new era.” CLICK HERE TO READ MORE
