Missouri is among the states that sued Google last week in federal court over alleged anti-competitive practices involving online advertising and privacy fixing.
Attorney General Eric Schmitt joined Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and eight other states including Utah, Indiana, Idaho, and Mississippi.
“Google presents a public image of caring about privacy, but behind the scenes, Google coordinates closely with the Big Tech companies to lobby the government to delay or destroy measures that would actually protect users’ privacy,” wrote lead counsel W. Mark Lanier in the Dec. 16 complaint filed in Sherman Division of the Eastern District of Texas.
The federal government has not yet enacted an American version of the 2018 European Union's general data protection regulation, which includes protections for consumer privacy, according to media reports.
“What Google is doing has an effect on every other search engine and Google is the most popular but people are moving away from Google,” Saint Louis University School of Law professor Yvette Joy Liebesman said. “They don't like the fact that their information is being collected to such a large extent.”
The lawsuit also claims Google is fixing the pricing of online advertisements in its favor to eliminate competition.
“Part of the reason that Google was able to gain a monopoly in the market for ad-buying tools for small advertisers was because Google had a monopoly in the display ad network market and the search advertising markets,” the opening brief states. “Advertisers had to use Google Ads to purchase ad space through Google’s ad network, GDN, which was the leader in reach (unique visitors) among competitors in 2009.”
Google addressed its practices in 2013 after the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) investigated the protocol of hiding its search advertising inventory from rival advertiser buying tools, according to the complaint.
Liebesman told the St. Louis Record that whether Schmitt and the other attorneys general who sued Google will succeed depends on how the market Google operates in is defined regarding what competition there is and whether or not there is a monopoly.
“Google will come up with their definition that's in their favor of what the market is and the attorneys general will have their definition of what the market is that they're defining to say google does have a monopoly,” she said. “It really comes down to a judge determining what the market is and whether there's so much anti-competitive behavior that it's harmful to consumers.”
This isn’t the first time that Schmitt has sued Google.
As previously reported in the St. Louis Record in November, Schmitt joined a Department of Justice lawsuit against Google in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to prohibit a monopoly through anti-competitive and exclusionary practices.
The difference between the two lawsuits includes recourse.
“Remedies might be different in the lawsuit that the Attorney General joined in with the Department of Justice as opposed to the lawsuit he joined with the other states,” Liebesman said in an interview. “States have an interest in protecting their citizens and the federal government has general responsibilities concerning the citizens of the United States and other companies that are operating in the U.S. So, it’s just a matter of states having a right to protect their citizens.”