Attorney General Phil Weiser led a coalition of 38 states and territories in filing a federal antitrust complaint against Google, alleging the massive search engine company uses exclusionary tactics and stifles prospective rivals.

“By undermining competition in this market, Google leaves the consumers with less choice and forestalls innovations, as well as erects artificial barriers that protect its search engine monopoly,” said Weiser.

Attorneys general from three other states joined Weiser during a virtual press conference Thursday to announce the legal action. A central concern was the amalgamation of personal search data the company uses to maintain its dominance. In the complaint, the states quoted former Google CEO Eric Schmidt as saying, “We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you have been thinking about.”

“That’s kind of a creepy concept,” said Attorney General Doug Peterson, R-Neb. “It’s not ‘people use Google.’ It’s ‘Google uses people.’ Google uses people to take a tremendous amount of personal data and to create personal files of each individual and they monetize that in the market.”

He added, “the oxygen to developing that data to each individual is through the searches.”

In October, the U.S. Department of Justice and 11 state attorneys general filed a separate antitrust lawsuit, also targeting Google’s exclusionary agreements that require it to be set as the default search engine on mobile devices or computers. Although the members of the 38-state lawsuit had communicated with the Department of Justice about their work, the latest complaint includes allegations beyond those in the Justice action.

For example, Weiser said, his complaint addresses home-based smart devices and Internet-connected vehicle technologies, for which Google has begun to use its market power to allegedly “entrench its dominant position.”

“Your likes, your thinking, your shopping habits, your attention, your screen time, web history, personal information, changes in barometric pressure as you get in and out of cars, these are all tracked and accumulated by Google and sold to advertisers,” said Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III, R-Tenn.

Peterson added that the states opted for a new lawsuit in order to retain their own experts and not be put into a “position of dependence” on the Justice Department. 

The Connected Commerce Council, a membership organization that promotes small businesses’ access to technology, called the litigation “nuts.”

“Small businesses are hurting, and instead of helping them, these Attorneys General are trying to force middlemen between small businesses and their customers,” said President Jake Ward. “In every market, middlemen drive up costs, drive down value and drive small businesses further from their customers. Intervening on behalf of billion-dollar publicly-traded intermediaries insults small businesses and harms consumers. To do so now is nuts.”

Google held a conference call on Thursday afternoon to respond to the allegations, with the condition that no company employees be quoted or identified.

One speaker said the aim of the lawsuit was to force the company to redesign Google’s search function in a way that would harm Americans through worse search results. They added that Google discovered a simple list of websites was not an ideal presentation of information.

Another speaker, addressing voice assistant and car technology, called such competition fierce, with Siri and Alexa (from Apple and Amazon, respectively) platforms creating robust choice.

In the complaint, the states indicated that Google’s closest competitor, Bing, constituted only 7% of searches in the United States. By bundling Google’s application with devices and consumer products to the exclusion of rivals, responses to changing consumer demand may go unmet, the states allege.

“Instead of simply producing a better service that keeps consumers and advertisers loyal, Google focuses on building an impenetrable moat to protect its kingdom,” reads the complaint.

Among the other concerns is the treatment of “specialized vertical providers” like Yelp and Expedia who offer searches by product category. The complaint reports that 30% to 40% of traffic to those companies comes from Google, but the search engine has adopted exclusionary tactics in some cases where companies seek to have their advertising appear in Google’s search results.

“For example, Google does not allow certain specialized vertical providers, which may have significant brand recognition compared to their local service providers, to directly advertise the service provider’s affiliation with the specialized vertical provider’s business,” the states allege.

The litigation is reminiscent of the antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft in the late 1990s, which also involved the Justice Department and 20 states. A federal appeals panel reversed a lower court’s decision that the software company be broken up, but the department ultimately reached a settlement with Microsoft.

The European Union has also tried to take action against Google, fining the company approximately $10 billion. However, Google still controls 90% of the search market there.

“We have to give credit to our counterparts in Europe. They got into this area more quickly than we did,” said Attorney General Tom Miller, D-Iowa. “I think they’ve come to the conclusion that their efforts haven’t been as effective and they’re rethinking their situation. We should be careful to learn from them.”

He added that an effective remedy to Google’s alleged monopoly may be elusive, and could require policy changes beyond what the antitrust action seeks to achieve.

Weiser has also joined Colorado in a 48-state lawsuit alleging similar anticompetitive behavior against Facebook.

Parties to the Google lawsuit include Colorado, Nebraska, Arizona, Iowa, New York, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wyoming, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Virginia, Guam and the District of Columbia.