States’ massive Google antitrust probe will expand into search and Android businesses
- The 50 attorneys general investigating Google are preparing to expand their antitrust investigation into the company’s search and Android businesses, people familiar with the matter tell CNBC.
- So far, the investigation, which is being led by Texas’ attorney general, has only explicitly focused on Google’s advertising business.
- The development comes as politicians on both sides of the aisle, including President Donald Trump and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, increasingly tee off on Silicon Valley.
Got that? The Texas Attorney General is leading the investigation for the other 49 states.
And now this, via KEYT-TV Santa Barbara CA:
Google is calling on Texas’s attorney general to hand over a vast trove of internal documents and communications related to a multi-state antitrust probe of the tech giant, including any information supplied to regulators by Texas’s outside consultants and Google’s chief critics and rivals.....MUCH MORE
In a sweeping public records request earlier this month, Google asked Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for virtually all records that relate to the investigation. A copy of the request was obtained by CNN through a separate public records inquiry.
The extensive filing is a view into Google’s playbook — and reveals who the tech giant believes to be some of its biggest antagonists — as it begins to respond to an investigation by 50 attorneys general representing 48 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia. (Texas is leading the investigation.)
Google’s Nov. 4 letter asks for communications between Paxton’s office and other attorneys general concerning the probe, as well as interactions with companies including AT&T — whose parent, WarnerMedia, owns CNN — and Comcast, News Corp, Oracle and Yelp. It also requests records of communications with journalists and news organizations, the advertising technology company AppNexus and the Republican Attorneys General Association, among others.
The request covers a broad range of materials. In addition to communications and documents, it asks for “calendars, schedules, call logs, visitor logs, and other records of interactions” with those named in the request....
In Soviet Mountain View, company investigates you (or your AG's)
*"How Google Interferes With Its Search Algorithms and Changes Your Results" (GOOG; EVIL).
