Google Should Be Treated as Utility, Ohio Argues in New Lawsuit
June 08 2021 - 1:48PM
Dow Jones News
By Tripp Mickle
Google's critics have said for years that it should be treated
like a public utility. On Tuesday, Ohio's attorney general filed a
lawsuit asking a judge to rule that the search company is one.
The case adds to the legal woes confronting the Alphabet Inc.
subsidiary, which also faces antitrust lawsuits from the Justice
Department and a separate consortium of states led by Colorado and
Texas. The company is contending with cases in countries around the
world where its dominance as a search provider has sparked a push
by regulators to corral its power.
Amid the array of court challenges, Ohio said that it is the
first state in the country to bring a lawsuit seeking a court
declaration that Google is a common carrier subject under state law
to government regulation. The lawsuit, which doesn't seek monetary
damages, says that Google has a duty to provide the same rights for
advertisements and product placement for competitors as it provides
for its own services.
"When you own the railroad or the electric company or the
cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give
everybody access," said Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, a
Republican.
Google didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
In a statement alongside a Supreme Court order in April, Justice
Clarence Thomas suggested that he believed regulating tech
platforms as utilities had merit.
That case involved former President Donald Trump's practice in
office of blocking certain individuals from following his Twitter
account. The court dismissed the case as moot, given that Mr. Trump
was no longer in office, but Justice Thomas suggested that
social-media networks such as Twitter, Google and other tech
companies could be regulated to limit their power over who speaks
and what is said over their platforms.
The Ohio case, however, isn't focused on speech but rather on
Google's tendency to surface search results that direct users to
its own products rather than rival services.
Google has a 91% share of search world-wide, according to
StatCounter, a web analytics firm. Google's decades-old lead in
search has helped it amass queries that allow it to improve its
service and make it difficult for rivals' offerings -- Microsoft
Corp.'s Bing or DuckDuckGo -- to compete.
For example, the search engine has appeared to surface videos
from its online-video service, YouTube, over similar clips from
Facebook Inc. The company also has faced allegations that it lifts
content such as song lyrics and weather from other websites and
features it as an answer to queries in so-called knowledge boxes
rather than directing users to sites that are the source of that
information.
Google has previously said that it doesn't give preference to
YouTube and that it doesn't scrape other websites for useful
information.
In 2020, two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click,
according to analysis of 5.1 trillion queries by SimilarWeb, a
digital measurement service. SparkToro Chief Executive Rand
Fishkin, who worked with SimilarWeb on its research, said that
practice keeps users on Google's site, where they are served ads,
and deprives other websites of traffic and ad dollars.
Mr. Yost argues Google's practices prevent Ohioans from making
informed choices by depriving them complete access to all available
information. For example, a search for a flight might direct a user
to Google Flights rather than surface the travel offerings of
services such as Orbitz and Travelocity.
Ohio also joined 37 others in a case led by Colorado's attorney
general that is suing Google in U.S. District Court for the
District of Columbia for anticompetitive conduct under the Sherman
Act. That lawsuit alleges monopoly power over search engines
through exclusive contracts such as its agreement with Apple Inc.
to be the default search provider on iPhones.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 08, 2021 13:33 ET (17:33 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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