Google’s Legal Peril Grows in Face of Third Antitrust Suit

More than 30 states added to Google’s mushrooming legal woes, accusing the company of illegally arranging its search results to push out smaller rivals. The bipartisan group of state prosecutors said in a lawsuit that Google downplayed websites that let users search for information in specialized areas like home repair services and travel reviews. The prosecutors also accused the company of using exclusive deals with phone makers like Apple to prioritize Google’s search service over rivals like Firefox and DuckDuckGo. That suppression, the states said in their lawsuit, has locked in Google’s nearly 90 percent market dominance in search and has made it impossible for the smaller companies to grow into formidable competitors. Google has sought to extend that dominance to new venues like home voice assistants, said the prosecutors, from states including Colorado, Nebraska, New York, and Utah. The prosecutors filed the lawsuit in the US District Court of the District of Columbia and asked the court to combine it with one filed by the Justice Department in October, which includes similar accusations. If the court combines the suits, it will expand the scope of the federal case to include a much wider array of accusations about Google’s search business. The multiple cases could take years to resolve.