Attorney General Miyares joins coalition suing Google for antitrust violations

On January 24, 2023, Attorney General Jason Miyares announced that the Commonwealth of Virginia had joined the Department of Justice and a bipartisan coalition of state attorneys general suing Google for violating federal antitrust laws. The coalition alleges that Google has engaged in anticompetitive conduct, including exclusionary and deceptive practices, in an attempt to monopolize the online display advertising industry.

“Corporations like Google wield enormous power and influence over the internet and our daily lives. Google is the primary search engine, host, and advertising vessel for hundreds of millions of consumers and producers, while also competing directly against those same producers and consumers. Google single-handedly controls what consumers see – and, more significantly – what they do not see. They also control what advertisers can say and at what price.” said Attorney General Miyares. “My office is dedicated to protecting Virginia consumers from unlawful monopolization of free markets. Virginia consumers deserve a free marketplace for products, services, and ideas – not a censored, curated monopoly from a multinational corporation like Google.”

The lawsuit alleges that Google undertook illegal acts to obtain and preserve its monopoly in the online advertising markets. These anti-competitive practices injured consumers nationwide by driving up the price of online advertising and decreasing innovation and efficiency in the industry.

Virginia is also a plaintiff in two other multistate lawsuits against Google, one in D.C. District Court that alleges Google illegally maintains its monopoly power over general search engines and related advertising markets and one in the Northern District of California that alleges exclusionary conduct relating to the Google Play Store for Android mobile devices and Google Billing.

Attorney General Miyares is joined by the Department of Justice, California, Colorado, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Tennessee.