The Washington Post reports:

Historically, the federal government has taken the starring role in competition matters, including investigations into potential monopolies and mergers, and such inquiries involving the tech giants are underway. But the states are potent actors in their own right, with the power to invoke local laws on antitrust and consumer-protection and to tap Washington’s antitrust statutes on behalf of their residents.

When state attorneys general have banded together on a broad, bipartisan basis, they’ve managed to muscle major changes to other industries. They forced billions of dollars in payments from Big Tobacco to pay health claims and finance antismoking campaigns in the 1990s. Two decades later, they helped reform unfair mortgage lending practices. More recently, states have led lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies they contend are responsible for the opioid crisis.

Now, they threaten to do the same to Silicon Valley, unleashing potentially wide-ranging antitrust punishments against not only Google but all of tech’s biggest players.

“The attorneys general have found they can actually rewrite the rules for entire sectors and individual companies through these cases,” said Rob McKenna, a former attorney general in Washington state and now a partner at the law firm Orrick. “The attorneys general have a lot of power here to achieve regulation by litigation.”

For years, Silicon Valley has been relatively free of regulation, particularly in Washington. Former president Barack Obama took a hands-off approach to encourage the industry’s growth, and Congress never took serious action. But a series of scandals, including the misuse of social media during the 2016 election, thrust the industry into the political spotlight, prompting some state and federal policymakers to question whether companies had become too big, too powerful and too unchecked. [Continue reading…]