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State attorneys general are formally launching separate antitrust probes into Facebook Inc. FB -2.15% and AlphabetInc. GOOG -0.45% ’s Google unit starting next week, putting added pressure on tech giants already under federal scrutiny.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said Friday that her office was organizing a bipartisan, multi-state probe into social media company Facebook. Her announcement confirmed an earlier Wall Street Journal report.“I am proud to be leading a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general in investigating whether Facebook has stifled competition and put users at risk,” Ms. James said in a statement. “We will use every investigative tool at our disposal to determine whether Facebook’s actions may have endangered consumer data, reduced the quality of consumers’ choices, or increased the price of advertising.”
Joining in the Facebook investigation so far are the attorneys general of Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Nebraska, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, and the District of Columbia, she said. The wide-ranging investigation focuses on Facebook’s “dominance in the industry and the potential anticompetitive conduct stemming from that dominance,” her office said.
Separately, the Google probe is expected to be announced at a news conference outside the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday, with a bipartisan group of about three dozen state attorneys general joining the effort, according to people familiar with the matter.
The investigation will be led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, the people said. The attorneys general will examine the impact of Google on digital advertising markets, this person said, as well as potential harms to consumers from their information and ad choices being concentrated in one company.
The action by the attorneys general, which has been anticipated for weeks, could possibly be expanded to other companies beyond Google and Facebook, some of the people said.
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