State Attorneys General Lay Groundwork for Google Investigation
State officials are focused on antitrust and consumer privacy concerns. But just as in Washington, there’s little consensus around a plan.
Last September, Jeff Sessions, then the U.S. attorney general, called a meeting of state attorneys general to discuss his suspicions that Google and Facebook were suppressing conservative views. After hearing him out, his audience steered the conversation toward a different concern. The state officials argued that the real problem was Silicon Valley’s market power and its handling of personal data, and they made the case for aggressive antitrust action, according to people familiar with the event, who asked for anonymity to describe private discussions.
Concern about Big Tech had already been mounting in statehouses, but Sessions’s face-to-face meeting created its own momentum. During the meeting, Makan Delrahim, the head of the antitrust division at the U.S. Department of Justice, suggested that attorneys general form a group and come back for further planning, according to a person who attended the meeting. In the weeks that followed, the National Association of Attorneys General formed a task force to look into issues in the technology industry, although the plan to follow up with the Justice Department was scuttled after Sessions stepped down from his post in November.