Missouri AG launches probe into Google's practices including user data collection, use of other sites' content, and if search results favor its own services
we are issuing Civil Investigative Demands to Google Inc. seeking documents and information related to the company's business practices and whether they violate the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act and Missouri's antitrust laws. pic.twitter.com/iO27KEhX27
Context & Ripple Effects
Missouri's attorney general is opening the first state-level salvo against Google over how it runs search: Civil Investigative Demands under the Missouri Merchandising Practices Act targeting user data collection, the company's use of other sites' content, and whether results favor its own services. The move matters because it predates and previews what followed — by mid-2019 sources reported the DOJ preparing its own antitrust investigation into Google and more than half of US state AGs readying a coordinated probe.
First-order effects
- Google must produce documents and information responding to the Civil Investigative Demands or contest them, while publishers and rival services whose content and traffic are at issue gain a state enforcer examining whether search favors Google's own offerings.
Second-order effects
- Other state attorneys general follow Missouri's template with their own demands — most aggressively the Texas AG's 29-page civil investigative demand with 200+ directives into Google's ad business — pushing the inquiry toward the DOJ and 11 Republican state AGs' monopolization suit over search and search advertising.
Third-order effects
- The Missouri playbook — consumer-protection statutes plus antitrust law aimed at platform self-preferencing — becomes the standard structure for state action against Google, persisting long enough that the same state AG office later extends the approach to AI products, as in Missouri AG Andrew Bailey's probe of Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Meta chatbots.
The trend: Republican state attorneys general have built a durable, escalating enforcement arc against Google that moves from search self-preferencing in 2017 through the federal monopolization case to today's AI-output investigations.