New York State's attorney general says 46 attorneys general have joined its antitrust probe into Facebook, separate from DOJ and FTC investigations
Support comes from political leaders as diverse as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is a Tea Party conservative, to Pennsylvania's Democratic AG Josh Shapiro. https://www.vox.com/... Bowen Xiao / @bowenxiao3 : #BREAKING UPDATE: 47 Attorneys Generals have just joined a multi-state antitrust investigation into #Facebook. (Last month nearly 50 State Attorneys Generals joined an anti-trust investigation into #Google.) Hades N. Morbid / @moorehn : Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg on allowing his arrogance to hurt his multibillion-dollar company. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Jason Kint / @jason_kint : 47 and counting states investigating Facebook, 48 states investigating Google. Really good to see bipartisan leadership into obvious and clear concerns. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This story closes the loop on an escalation that started well before antitrust was even the frame: back in February, attorneys general in six states including New York were probing how Facebook handled user data in the wake of Cambridge Analytica (six-state data practices investigation). By September, New York had converted that into a formal multi-state antitrust inquiry (multi-state antitrust investigation), and today it announces that 46 attorneys general have signed on.
What makes the coalition notable is its breadth — Texas Tea Party conservative Ken Paxton alongside Pennsylvania Democrat Josh Shapiro — which strips any single party of the ability to dismiss it as partisan overreach. It also runs deliberately parallel to, not inside, the DOJ and FTC investigations, meaning Facebook now faces two enforcement tracks at once.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg now face discovery from a bipartisan bloc of state AGs with subpoena power across dozens of jurisdictions, on top of the federal probes — the company cannot settle or stall one channel and make the other go away.
- New York's attorney general gains leverage from sheer headcount: with 46 states aligned, settlement terms or remedies would need to satisfy a bloc, not a single regulator.
Second-order effects
- Google is already under a near-identical structure — nearly 50 state AGs joined an antitrust investigation there just last month — so both Big Tech ad-and-acquisition incumbents are being examined by the same coalition playbook rather than case-by-case.
- Facebook's acquisition strategy becomes the focal point: every past purchase now has to be defended against a 'buy or bury' reading by states looking for merger patterns, raising the effective cost of future deals.
Third-order effects
- State AGs are establishing themselves as a standing second front of tech antitrust enforcement — if the pattern holds toward litigation, as New York's coalition later did when Letitia James led 48 AGs in suing Facebook over its "buy or bury" approach, platform mergers face a dual-track review that no federal-agency settlement can fully preempt.
The trend: State attorneys general are institutionalizing themselves as a permanent, bipartisan second enforcement front on Big Tech antitrust, running parallel to DOJ and FTC actions.