• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, August 7, 2024

The Ohio Attorney General is calling attention to this week's ruling that Google violated antitrust law, arguing in a letter to a state court judge that the ruling relates to Ohio's effort to declare Google a common carrier.

The antitrust finding is “highly instructive” to Ohio's claims against the company, Jennifer Pratt, director of litigation for the Ohio Attorney General, said in a letter sent Wednesday to Delaware County Court Judge James Schuck.

Her letter comes in a battle dating to 2021, when Ohio Attorney General David Yost claimed that Google is a “common carrier” -- comparable to a railroad -- and should therefore be prohibited from prioritizing its services or products in search results.

Pratt writes that even though the antitrust case presents different legal issues than Ohio's lawsuit -- which focuses on Ohio rules governing common carriers -- the decision is “relevant and helpful” to the state's case against Google.

The antitrust ruling, issued Monday by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, focused on Google's search distribution deals.

Mehta found that Google illegally maintained a monopoly in two markets -- general search services, and search text ads -- by contracting to serve as the default search engine on browsers operated by Apple and Mozilla, as well as on Android devices.

That ruling “confirms that Google Search is a matter of public concern,” Pratt writes.

She adds that the decision “provides valuable insights into the improbability that Google Search's importance to the interests of the general public will erode anything in the foreseeable future,” referring to Mehta's findings that Google dominates the search engine market.

While Google has not yet responded to Ohio's new filing, the company has argued that it has a First Amendment right to wield control over its search results.

“Just as a newspaper editor must choose what information to include in the paper, what to put on the front page, and in what order, a search engine must decide what information to include in its search results, what to put on the first page of the results, and in what order,” Google wrote this January in a motion seeking summary judgment.

Last month, Google filed a letter with Schuck flagging the Supreme Court's recent ruling in a dispute over content moderation laws. Justice Elena Kagan wrote in that case that tech platforms have First Amendment rights to control the content on their services.

The First Amendment “does not go on leave when social media are involved,” Kagan wrote.

“This Court has many times held, in many contexts, that it is no job for government to decide what counts as the right balance of private expression -- to 'un-bias' what it thinks biased, rather than to leave such judgments to speakers and their audiences,” she added.

Google has also argued it doesn't meet Ohio's definition of common carrier because it doesn't “transport” or “carry” people or their property, and because its search results are individually tailored.

“It does not carry or transport anything for hire, and it does not hold itself out as acting 'indifferently,'” the company wrote.