Google’s legal peril rises with third antitrust suit
More than 30 states added to Google’s mushrooming legal woes Thursday, accusing the Silicon Valley titan of illegally arranging its search results to push out smaller rivals.
One day after 10 other states accused Google of abusing its dominance in advertising and overcharging publishers, and two months after the Justice Department said the company’s deals with other tech giants throttled competition, the bipartisan group of state prosecutors said in a lawsuit Thursday that Google downplayed websites that let users search for information in specialized areas like home repair services and travel reviews. Prosecutors also accused the company of using exclusive deals with phonemakers like Apple to prioritize Google’s search service over rivals like Firefox andDuckDuckGo.
That suppression, the states said in their lawsuit, has locked in Google’s nearly 90% market domi
nance in search and has made it impossible for the smaller companies to grow into formidable competitors. Google has sought to extend that dominance to new venues like home voice assistants, said the prosecutors, from states including Colorado, Nebraska, New York and Utah.
The cascade of lawsuits against Google, which the company says it will fight in court, are indicative of the growing backlash against the largest tech companies, a movement that increasingly looks like it will usher in major changes for some of the world’s most popular digital services.
Critics have argued for years that Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon built sprawling empires over commerce, commu
nications and culture, and then abused their growing power. But only recently have federal or state regulators brought major cases against them.
The Federal Trade Commission and 40 state attorneys general last week accused Facebook of buying smaller rivals like Instagram and WhatsApp to maintain its dominance, in a case that threatens to break the company apart. Regulators in Washington and around the country are also investigating Amazon and Apple.
In addition, Democratic and Republican political leaders have assumed a far more aggressive stance against the industry, including pushing changes to a once-sacrosanct law that protects sites from liability for the content posted by their users.
“Our economy is more concentrated than ever, and consumers are squeezed
when they are deprived of choices in valued products and services,” said Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general. “Google’s anti-competitive actions have protected its general search monopolies and excluded rivals, depriving consumers of the benefits of competitive choices, forestalling innovation and undermining new entry or expansion.”
The prosecutors filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia and asked the court to combine it with one filed by the Justice Department in October, which includes similar accusations. If the court combines the suits, it will expand the scope of the federal case to include a much wider array of accusations about Google’s search business. The multiple cases could take years to resolve.
Adam Cohen, a director of economic policy at Google, said in a blog post
that the lawsuit “seeks to redesign search in ways that would deprive Americans of helpful information and hurt businesses’ ability to connect directly with customers.”
“We look forward to making that case in court, while remaining focused on delivering a high- quality search experience for our users,” he said.
Weiser said it was “premature” to discuss specific outcomes for the case, such as ways in which the company could be broken up.
A Google spokeswoman did not immediately have a comment. The company has long denied accusations of antitrust violations and is expected use its global network of lawyers, economists and lobbyists to fight the multiple accusations against it. The company has a market value of $1.18 trillion and cash reserves of over $120 billion.