“We fortunately have remedies that are much broader in scope.” “Fines are like kicking gorillas in the shin,” he said at the time. When filing the suit, in December 2020, he proclaimed to the press that he wouldn’t be content with a monetary settlement, and even floated the idea of forced asset sales.
As their investigation revealed how Google uses its dominance in online search and advertising-the company sold 28.6 percent of digital ads last year, followed by Facebook’s 23.8 percent-to starve competitors of traffic and block them from the ad market, Peterson felt a growing sense of outrage. Weiser’s experience was critical to dusting off those tools as the pair built their case and recruited more states to their cause over the next two years. Most states have strong antitrust laws that have mostly gone unused for the past few decades, as economists, politicians, and jurists nationwide took a benign view of corporate megamergers. “Thank God for Phil Weiser,” Peterson says today. But a week after he took office, Weiser got a call. Weiser had no idea that his background in antitrust, which he himself considered a niche corner of law, would be relevant.
He thought to himself, “Data is the new oil.”Ī few months after that presentation, Phil Weiser, a wonkish lawyer who quite literally wrote the book on 21st-century consumer protection- Digital Crossroads: Telecommunications Law and Policy in the Internet Age-was elected Colorado’s 39th attorney general. It was at that meeting that Peterson first realized the power in knowing what millions-billions-of people search for, buy, click on, and “like” online. Google, Facebook, Amazon-these companies’ constant surveillance over legions of users gives them a commodity more valuable than anything that comes out of the ground: information. Big Tech, a presenter told them, has spawned a new cohort of monopolies rivaling the power of the 19th-century robber barons. In June 2018, Doug Peterson of Nebraska sat with other state attorneys general in a hotel ballroom in Portland, Oregon, and listened to the bad news.
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