49 States and The US Dept. of Justice Now Suing Google for Antitrust Activities
"A bipartisan coalition of 38 attorneys general have sued Google LLC for allegedly deploying illegal, anticompetitive conduct to maintain its monopoly in the general search services and search advertising markets. They also moved to merge their case with the October suit brought by the U.S. Department of Justice and 11 states..
The AGs said Google has hurt competition, denied consumers choice, hampered innovation, and even stifled the development of privacy protections. The company's anti-competitive conduct includes the use of exclusionary contracts (e.g. with Apple), discriminating against specialized search sites (e.g. Expedia, Angie's List, Yelp), and disadvantaging competitors using its search-engine marketing tool (e.g. Bing), the suit says.
“'Google sits at the crossroads of so many areas of our digital economy and has used its dominance to illegally squash competitors, monitor nearly every aspect of our digital lives, and profit to the tune of billions,' said New York Attorney Letitia James. 'Through its illegal conduct, the company has ensured that hundreds of millions of people turn to Google first when looking for an answer, but it doesn't take a web search to understand that unchecked corporate power shouldn't have disproportionate control over our data and information. For decades now, Google has served as the gatekeeper of the internet and has weaponized our data to kill off competitors and control our decision making — resulting in all of us paying more for the services we use every day.'”
This is the THIRD such lawsuit against the internet behemoth.