Tennessee will be the 37th state to join a massive anti-trust lawsuit against tech giant Google.
Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III announced Wednesday that Tennessee will band together with the other states in the lawsuit in an attempt to combat what they see as anti-competitive trade practices.
“Google’s ‘Play’ was the long game-enticing manufacturers and operators to adopt Android by promising to remain open,” Slatery said. “Now that digital doorway is closed – if you want in, you’ve got to do it Google’s way. You essentially have to use its app store, use its payment processing system, and pay its unreasonable commissions for digital purchases. All of this harms consumers, limits competition and reduces innovation. Tennessee and 36 other states are no longer on the sidelines.”
The Google Play store is Google’s version of the Apple App Store, where Android users go to download applications to their phones.
The attorneys general who is a party to the suit says that Google’s practices violate federal and state antitrust laws.
Some of the claims against the tech titan include it “buying off” other application distributors, that the company’s “contractual requirements foreclose competition by mandating that the Play Store and many other Google apps be ‘pre-loaded’ on essentially all devices designed to run on the Android OS, and that they be given the most prominent placement on device home screens,” and that “app developers and app users alike to use Google’s payment processing service, Google Play Billing, to process payments for in-app purchases of content consumed within the app.”
The last practice, according to the lawsuit, allows Google to charge exorbitant fees – up to 30 percent – for payment processing services.
It’s more bad news for Google, which Wednesday became the target of a class action lawsuit led by former President Donald J. Trump.
That lawsuit claims that Google, along with its Silicon Valley counterparts Facebook and Twitter, are violating the First Amendment rights of Americans by censoring and banning conservative or right-leaning content from their platforms.
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Pete D’Abrosca is a contributor at The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network. Follow Pete on Twitter. Email tips to dabroscareports@gmail.com.