Detractors of Google Take Fight to the States

They have lobbied state attorneys general. They have hired former state attorneys general. They have even helped draft a menacing letter for one state attorney general. And they have given the target -- Google -- a code name: Goliath.

Google’s detractors complain about the search giant to everyone they can, from raising concerns about the company’s dominance with regulators in Brussels to antitrust officials in Washington. Now, they are taking the fight into states, often to push Google to censor illegal content and sites from search results. The Motion Picture Association of America and an organization backed by Microsoft, Expedia and Oracle, among others, have aggressively lobbied attorneys general to build cases against Google in recent years, sometimes in complementary ways.