Forty-eight states have launched a major antitrust investigation targeting Google

Search and adver­tis­ing giant Google and its par­ent com­pa­ny Alpha­bet are about to face more reg­u­la­to­ry scruti­ny, but this time from the state lev­el:

Fifty attor­neys gen­er­al are join­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion into Google over pos­si­ble antitrust vio­la­tions, Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton, the initiative’s leader, announced Mon­day. The news con­firms reports last week about the bipar­ti­san inves­ti­ga­tion into Google’s practices.

The probe includes attor­neys gen­er­al from forty-eight states, the Dis­trict of Colum­bia and Puer­to Rico.

Wash­ing­ton, Ore­gon, Ida­ho, Alas­ka, and Mon­tana are all on board. The only states that aren’t par­tic­i­pat­ing are Cal­i­for­nia (where Alpha­bet is head­quar­tered) and Alaba­ma. The Los Ange­les Times reports that Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Attor­ney Gen­er­al declined to pro­vide a ratio­nale for why the Gold­en State isn’t a par­ty to the probe.

That’s left many Google crit­ics scratch­ing their heads.

“I just do not under­stand why Cal­i­for­nia is not a part of this effort,” said John Simp­son, who served as the pri­va­cy and tech­nol­o­gy project direc­tor at Con­sumer Watch­dog, a non­prof­it advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion, until he retired ear­li­er this year. “Google has monop­o­lized the mar­ket and real­ly needs to be held account­able for that.”

It is nonethe­less remark­able to see Demo­c­ra­t­ic and Repub­li­can attor­neys gen­er­al from the coun­try’s oth­er states (minus Alaba­ma) team­ing up to inves­ti­gate Google. Regard­less of their polit­i­cal views, pri­va­cy and fair­ness are on the minds of these AGs, as their state­ments to the press regard­ing the probe make clear.

“We have fifty attor­neys gen­er­al from across the nation who are involved in this inves­ti­ga­tion that we’re lead­ing from Texas… This is a com­pa­ny that dom­i­nates all aspects of adver­tis­ing on the inter­net and search­ing on the inter­net as they dom­i­nate the buy­ers’ side, the sell­ers’ side, the auc­tion side and even the video side with YouTube.”

– Texas Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ken Pax­ton, a Republican

“When there is no longer a free mar­ket or com­pe­ti­tion, this increas­es prices, even when some­thing is mar­ket­ed as free, and harms con­sumers. Is some­thing real­ly free if we are increas­ing­ly giv­ing over our pri­va­cy? Is some­thing real­ly free if online ad prices go up based on one company’s control?”

– Flori­da Attor­ney Gen­er­al Ash­ley Moody, a Republican

“The state attor­neys gen­er­al, they are an inde­pen­dent bunch… And they can be quite tena­cious. So I’m very con­fi­dent that this bipar­ti­san group is going to be led by the facts and not be swayed by any con­clu­sion that may fall short, if you will, if it’s incon­sis­tent with our facts, on the fed­er­al side. So we’re going to do what we think is right based on our investigation.”

– Dis­trict of Colum­bia Attor­ney Gen­er­al Karl Racine, a Democrat

“There’s no ques­tion that Google is the dom­i­nant play­er when it comes to inter­net search­es with near­ly nine­ty per­cent of the [market’s] share… And there’s noth­ing wrong with being the dom­i­nant play­er if it’s done fair­ly. That’s what our inves­ti­ga­tion intends to uncov­er and reveal — whether Google is play­ing by the rules and act­ing fairly.”

– Utah Attor­ney Gen­er­al Sean Reyes, a Republican

The rea­son the above quotes are most­ly from Repub­li­cans, by the way, is that the press con­fer­ence announc­ing the probe most­ly fea­tured Repub­li­can AGs. Which, again, is very sig­nif­i­cant con­sid­er­ing that Repub­li­can elect­ed offi­cials are usu­al­ly sym­pa­thet­ic to the coun­try’s cap­tains of indus­try and their armies of lobbyists.

NPI has been con­cerned for more than a decade about Google’s busi­ness prac­tices and its per­sis­tent, unend­ing efforts to under­mine every­one’s privacy.

We’re glad to see oth­ers voic­ing sim­i­lar con­cerns, espe­cial­ly small busi­ness­es.

The CEO of Base­camp, a small soft­ware firm in Chica­go, helped set off the new­ly skep­ti­cal ques­tions this week when he blast­ed Google for its pol­i­cy of allow­ing any­one to buy ads relat­ed to a brand name; if some­one search­es Google for “Base­camp,” they might first see an ad for the company’s rivals.

“When Google puts four paid ads ahead of the first organ­ic result for your own brand name, you’re forced to pay up if you want to be found,” Basecamp’s CEO Jason Fried said on Twit­ter on Tuesday.

“It’s a shake­down. It’s ransom.”

We agree. And it’s time for our elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives to do some­thing about it. When a mar­ket becomes hope­less­ly rigged, inter­ven­tion is required.

There’s no such thing as a “free” mar­ket, con­trary to what groups like the Wash­ing­ton Pol­i­cy Cen­ter assert. All mar­kets are con­struct­ed for some­one’s ben­e­fit, and it is essen­tial that we con­tin­u­ous­ly ask the ques­tion Who is this mar­ket serv­ing when eval­u­at­ing a mar­ket’s per­for­mance. At NPI, we believe mar­kets should oper­ate fair­ly and con­tribute to the broad pros­per­i­ty of all.

Google has become syn­ony­mous with search, and it has used its dom­i­nant posi­tion in that mar­ket to cre­ate a lucra­tive adver­tis­ing busi­ness. Small busi­ness­es want­i­ng to be found by new cus­tomers have no choice but to play by Google’s self-serv­ing rules. There are oth­er search engines, but they have a very small mar­ket share.

This is some­thing that is undoubt­ed­ly going to be a focus of the antitrust probe.

(Speak­ing of oth­er search engines, we rec­om­mend switch­ing your default search engine to Duck­Duck­Go, which does­n’t track you and offers supe­ri­or results.)

The Euro­pean Union has for years been the only pub­lic enti­ty in the world real­ly putting Google under a reg­u­la­to­ry mag­ni­fy­ing glass.

That now seems to be chang­ing with the launch of fed­er­al and state lev­el probes into Google’s busi­ness prac­tices. In the 1990s, Microsoft came under sim­i­lar scruti­ny, and was ulti­mate­ly tak­en to court over its busi­ness practices.

At one point, a fed­er­al judge ordered Microsoft bro­ken up. Microsoft appealed that rul­ing and was able to avoid being split in two, but the lit­i­ga­tion sparked reforms to the com­pa­ny’s busi­ness prac­tices. In our view, the Microsoft of today is a bet­ter behaved com­pa­ny than the Microsoft of the 1990s and ear­ly 2000s.

We don’t see Google aban­don­ing its “sur­veil­lance cap­i­tal­ism” busi­ness mod­el on its own. Google needs an inter­ven­tion so that it becomes a com­pa­ny less dom­i­nant in search and adver­tis­ing and much more respect­ful of every­one’s privacy.

Here’s hop­ing it gets one.