Profile of Jim Hood, who tussled with Google during his 16 years as Mississippi's AG and, sources say, is now advising the AG-led multistate antitrust probe
Leah Nylen / Politico : Tweets: @ruralchrislee Tweets: Chris Lee / @ruralchrislee : Glad to see former Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood fighting the good fight. “Unfailingly polite in his soft Southern drawl, Hood compares Google to the robber barons of old and leans into hyperbole to argue his points against the company.” https://www.google.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Jim Hood's fight with Google is old news with new stakes. In 2014, after Google sued him, Hood backed off the MPAA-backed investigation into the company; two years later an appeals court overturned the injunction against his inquiry as premature, leaving him free to pursue it in state court. The probe then outgrew one AG: by September 2019, more than half the state attorneys general were preparing a joint antitrust investigation of Google.
This Politico profile lands weeks before that coalition's expected announcement and reports, per sources, that Hood is now advising it — meaning the AG whose solo campaign Google once tied up in court is contributing to a multistate effort Colorado's Phil Weiser would later co-lead.
First-order effects
- Google now faces an adviser who has spent 16 years studying how it responds to state legal pressure — from the 2014 suit that froze his investigation to the appellate ruling that reopened it — inside a probe far larger than his own ever was.
- The multistate coalition gains a veteran of Google litigation at exactly the moment its strategy is being set, ahead of the announcement first reported in 2019.
Second-order effects
- Google's defense apparatus, led by top lawyer Kent Walker, must now prepare for state-level claims shaped by someone who knows which of its past tactics worked — a harder opponent than any single AG office.
- Other attorneys general weighing their own tech investigations get a working template: pair a bipartisan coalition with advisers who have direct history fighting the target.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, individual AG-Google feuds are consolidating into standing multistate enforcement structures, shifting antitrust initiative toward state coalitions that survive any one attorney general leaving office.
- The Hood arc — corporate lawsuit, court injunction, comeback inside a bigger coalition — suggests future targets will face opponents who arrive pre-briefed on prior legal battles rather than starting from scratch.
The trend: State attorneys general are converting isolated, often stalled fights with Google into coordinated multistate antitrust campaigns staffed by veterans of those earlier battles.