Attorneys general from every US state, excluding California and Alabama, as well as DC and Puerto Rico, launch an antitrust investigation into Google
KEY POINTS — Texas will lead a joint state investigation into Google over antitrust concerns, state Attorney General Ken Paxton announced Monday.
Context & Ripple Effects
A week after sources told reporters that more than half of state attorneys general were quietly preparing a joint probe, Texas AG Ken Paxton made it official: an antitrust investigation into Google backed by every US state except California and Alabama, plus DC and Puerto Rico — the previously leaked multistate effort now formally launched under Paxton's lead.
The announcement puts nearly the entire map of state enforcers on record against one company at once, and it precedes the federal track: about a year later, GOP-led states were weighing whether to join the DOJ's search-monopoly complaint while drafting claims of their own, a split that eventually produced the states' separate 36-state Play Store billing suit in 2021.
First-order effects
- Google now faces discovery and document demands from a coalition spanning virtually every US jurisdiction simultaneously, with Paxton coordinating strategy rather than each state investigating alone.
- California and Alabama sit out the coalition — California because it hosts and regulates Google locally, leaving the company's home state outside the multistate front.
Second-order effects
- The state track forces sequencing decisions for the DOJ: when the federal search suit lands, roughly a dozen GOP-led states must choose between joining it and preserving their own complaints, fragmenting or multiplying the legal pressure.
- Google's ad and Play businesses face two distinct theories of attack from the same coalition — search conduct federally, app-store billing commissions in the states' own case — raising settlement complexity across fronts.
Third-order effects
- State attorneys general are establishing themselves as a durable second front of Big Tech antitrust enforcement, capable of sustaining cases even where federal action narrows or settles first.
- If the pattern holds, major platforms face standing multi-jurisdictional exposure rather than episodic probes, changing how they weigh product practices like mandatory billing systems and default placements.
The trend: US antitrust pressure on Big Tech is shifting from single-agency action to stacked federal-plus-multistate campaigns, with state coalitions now initiating their own cases against the largest platforms.