More than 30 U.S. states added to Google’s mushrooming legal woes Thursday, accusing the Silicon Valley titan of illegally arranging its search results to push out smaller rivals.
One day after 10 other states accused Google of abusing its dominance in advertising and overcharging publishers, and two months after the U.S. Justice Department said the company’s deals with other tech giants throttled competition, the bipartisan group of state prosecutors said in a lawsuit Thursday that Google downplayed websites that let users search for information in specialized areas like home repair services and travel reviews. 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% 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.