Google Should Be Treated as Utility, Ohio Argues in New Lawsuit

Amid the array of court challenges, Ohio said that it is the first state in the country to bring a lawsuit seeking a court declaration that Google is a common carrier subject under state law to government regulation. The lawsuit, which doesn’t seek monetary damages, says that Google has a duty to provide the same rights for advertisements and product placement for competitors as it provides for its own services.

“When you own the railroad or the electric company or the cellphone tower, you have to treat everyone the same and give everybody access,” said Ohio Attorney General

Dave Yost,

a Republican.

A Google spokesman said that the remedies sought in the Ohio lawsuit would worsen the company’s search results and impair businesses’ ability to connect directly with customers.

“Ohioans simply don’t want the government to run Google like a gas or electric company,” a spokesman said. “This lawsuit has no basis in fact or law and we’ll defend ourselves against it in court.”

In a statement alongside a Supreme Court order in April, Justice

Clarence Thomas

suggested that he believed regulating tech platforms as utilities had merit.

That case involved former President

Donald Trump’s

practice in office of blocking certain individuals from following his

Twitter

account. The court dismissed the case as moot, given that Mr. Trump was no longer in office, but Justice Thomas suggested that social-media networks such as Twitter, Google and other tech companies could be regulated to limit their power over who speaks and what is said over their platforms.

The Ohio case, however, isn’t focused on speech but rather on Google’s tendency to surface search results that direct users to its own products rather than rival services.

Google has a 91% share of search world-wide, according to StatCounter, a web analytics firm. Google’s decades-old lead in search has helped it amass queries that allow it to improve its service and make it difficult for rivals’ offerings—

Microsoft Corp.’s

Bing or DuckDuckGo—to compete.

For example, the search engine has appeared to surface videos from its online-video service, YouTube, over similar clips from

Facebook Inc.

The company also has faced allegations that it lifts content such as song lyrics and weather from other websites and features it as an answer to queries in so-called knowledge boxes rather than directing users to sites that are the source of that information.

Google has previously said that it doesn’t give preference to YouTube and that it doesn’t scrape other websites for useful information.

In 2020, two-thirds of Google searches ended without a click, according to analysis of 5.1 trillion queries by SimilarWeb, a digital measurement service. SparkToro Chief Executive Rand Fishkin, who worked with SimilarWeb on its research, said that practice keeps users on Google’s site, where they are served ads, and deprives other websites of traffic and ad dollars.

In March, Google said in a blog post that SimilarWeb’s methodology was flawed because some people refine their queries before clicking through to a website. It said that its search engine sends billions of clicks to websites daily.

Mr. Yost argues Google’s practices prevent Ohioans from making informed choices by depriving them complete access to all available information. For example, a search for a flight might direct a user to Google Flights rather than surface the travel offerings of services such as Orbitz and Travelocity.

Ohio also joined 37 others in a case led by Colorado’s attorney general that is suing Google in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia for anticompetitive conduct under the Sherman Act. That lawsuit alleges monopoly power over search engines through exclusive contracts such as its agreement with

Apple Inc.

to be the default search provider on iPhones.

Write to Tripp Mickle at [email protected]