A bipartisan group of 38 AGs sues Google for alleged antitrust violations in search, its third antitrust suit, including exclusionary contracts with Apple
More than 30 states said that the company downplayed websites that let users search for information in specialized areas.
The state suit goes further than the federal one on two fronts: it targets Google's downranking of specialized vertical-search sites, and it names the exclusionary contracts with Apple that make Google the default search engine. The pattern held into the following year, when AGs from 36 states and DC filed a separate Play Store billing-commission suit.
First-order effects
Google now faces parallel state and federal litigation over the same search business, with the state complaint adding Apple's default-placement deals as an explicit target rather than background context.
Specialized vertical-search sites — travel, local, shopping — gain standing in the case as allegedly suppressed competitors, giving plaintiffs concrete conduct beyond self-preferencing claims.
Second-order effects
Apple is pulled deeper into the dispute as a counterparty to the exclusionary contracts, raising pressure on the revenue-sharing default deals that underpin both companies' search economics.
With bipartisan AGs joining the DOJ's Republican-led action, Google loses the framing of antitrust enforcement as purely partisan, hardening the political environment for further suits like the later Play Store case.
Third-order effects
If the default-contract theory gains traction across these overlapping cases, the distribution agreements that lock up search defaults on browsers and phones become the structural battleground for how search competition is regulated.
A sustained multi-front campaign by state AGs points toward antitrust enforcement becoming a standing feature of big-platform oversight, with states acting independently of federal timelines.
The trend: State attorneys general are building a durable, bipartisan second track of antitrust enforcement against Google's search and app-store practices alongside the DOJ's case.
The states behind today's lawsuit are reviewing the complaint filed yesterday by Texas, according to a person familiar with the matter, but no decision has been made about whether to join that case.
Nice explainer in the NYT on the alleged conspiracy between Google and Facebook, spelled out in new 10 State AG complaint, to restrict competition for publishers and thereby permit Google to overcharge publishers for the ads they showed. Whoa if true. https://www.nytimes.com/... …
🚨🚨🚨 After @TXAG announced their anti-trust lawsuit yesterday, nearly 40 states are suing @Google. Long overdue after years of predatory practices that push out competitors, compromise privacy, & evade accountability for harm done to Black communities.https://www.washingtonpost. c…
@johnbattelle Apple's anti trust exposure is pretty narrow relative to Facebook and Google. Ending the Google payment for Safari traffic will actually hurt Apple shareholders more than breaking off Youtube and Display ads will hurt Alphabet or separating IG and WhatsApp will hurt…
You guys that's an antitrust wrap for the year. No more tech lawsuits expected this year. In 2021, US/states v. Google and Facebook will occupy a lot of firepower and interest. Please follow @daiwaka @dmccabe @MikeIsaac and me for these epic battles https://www.nytimes.com/...
Today, Google said its search results have gotten better since 2000: https://blog.google/... Over @washingtonpost, here are three search results I annotated that show how they've gotten worse: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Another lawsuit, this one filed by 38 states that didn't participate in yesterday's, focused on how Google put its own products & answers above competitors in its results: https://www.nytimes.com/... I'd be pretty nervous if I were them. https://twitter.com/...
So, to review this week in Google. Monday: outage across many major products. Tuesday: Gmail goes berserk. Wed: letter sent from staff researchers demanding VP is reassigned; 10 states sue. Thursday: 38 AGs sue. Company brought in (based on analyst forecasts) $2.1bn.
As you hear Google defend itself today against antitrust charges by claiming that it faces stiff competition in search from *checks notes* Expedia and TripAdvisor, it's instructive to recall the monopolists' playbook that Peter Thiel laid out back in 2014. https://onezero.medium.…
The Info analyzes the TX AG suit in a revealing way. The Info writes that the TX AG's allegations around Google and WhatsApp concern a “mundane” practice—if you back up WhatsApp in Google, Google scans it. https://www.theinformation.com/ ...?
Para 141 of Texas AG filing against Google & Facebook is incredible: Facebook gave Google access to people's end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, photos, videos, and audio files. I want to see the text of that deal. Was it in US only, or EU too? https://courtlistener.com/... h…