From Ars Technica:
States are following the lead of several federal and international agencies.
Big Tech will soon be facing too many antitrust probes to count on one hand, as several states reportedly plan to launch their own joint investigation to accompany all of the federal inquiries already in progress.....MORE
Attorneys general for as many as 20 states may be joining forces to dig into whether the dominant tech players use their outsized market power unfairly to quash competition, sources tell the Wall Street Journal.
A bipartisan group of about a dozen attorneys general met with Department of Justice officials last month to discuss issues of competition in the tech sector, the WSJ reports, a meeting at which the AGs of Mississippi, New York, North Carolina, and Texas were present. The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James told the WSJ that the officials involved "have concerns over the control of personal data by large tech companies and will hold them accountable for anticompetitive practices that endanger privacy and consumer data."
The specific targets of the probe were not named but are widely considered to include Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google—all of which are the targets of other antitrust probes, both in the US and abroad—at a minimum.
A crowded field
The WSJ writes that the rumored probe could "dovetail" nicely with existing antitrust review efforts underway by the DOJ, which itself is only one of the many agencies digging into tech's competitive practices....
