United States of America. Julian Island of Political. We just heard from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton about the lawsuit that he is leading against the social media company Google. Where does this fit with all the lawsuits that are happening right now? Well can pass in blast suit is one of sort of Q major sets of cases that there are against Google. There's also another case against Facebook. So Ken Paxton see, it was just filed Wednesday in Texas, all of the other states, the ones both against Google that relate to search and the ones against Facebook that relate to social networking. Those are all in Washington, D. C. And who filed those so the ones against Google. There are 21 of them was filed by the Justice Department in October, along with support from 11 attorneys general. Now all of those attorneys general at the time were Republicans. But since three Democrats, California was constant and Michigan have asked to join that stupid On Ben as a Thursday there is now a second suit against Google. It's brought by 38 attorneys general from 35 States, Washington, DC, Puerto Rico and Guam. That one is also over grows power on in the search market. They accuse it of having a monopoly on search. And search advertising and using that power to stifle competition and innovations in new technologies, like connected cars and smart speakers. No Lien Island. Are these suits similar enough that they could be joined? Yes, the state attorney general, he just smiled so that they actually intend for them to be brought before the same judge who was already seeing the Justice Department case. And that they intend to litigate the case alongside the DOJ. This is something they do and have done in the past in previous cases, such as the Microsoft case from the 19 late 19 nineties. So would you compare what's happening now to what happened to Microsoft in the nineties? I think it's definitely a comparison that they want to make the Justice Department's case sites for Microsoft on on the very first page, And whenever you talk, tomo there the Justice Previn or any of the state attorneys general, they often look to the Microsoft case. Sort of the example to follow because that is the most recent case we've had against the major tax platform for anti competitive activity before that, you really have to go back to the eighties and sort of look up. What was done with a TNT in the break up of Marcel? No. Is it significant that all these cases are happening right now, during the presidential transition administration transition Well, About all of these cases were actually opened last spring, the Justice Department and the SQ 60 have AH sort of got together and they had an agreement about who would look at which, Um, uh uh, They got together and talked about who would look at which companies because they didn't want to overlap. So the FTC decided to look at Facebook and Amazon, the Justice Department decided to look at Google and Apple. Each one sort of realized that they really only have the resources to prioritize one at a time. So that's why the FTC was moving for the Facebook and the Justice Department with Google, the Have been, you know, As I said, they've been investigating this now for 15 16 months. That's about a normal amount of time for one of these investigations when the FTC looked at Google In 2013. They took 19 months. Um, and that's so It's about a normal time for an investigation. But they are definitely trying to get these things out the door before the Biden administration comes in. It'll be the same death numbers litigating the cases you've been during the investigation. But all of the you know, top officials will turn over when the administration which is so they just wanted to get them, you know, locked and loaded and ready to go. So Lian Island do we expect these to last for several years? Oh, yeah. Antitrust cases are notoriously slow. I've had fun that I've been covering 10 years. These ones. The ones that are filed by the government tend to move a little bit more quickly. On average, I would say maybe 2 to 3 years when the Justice Department food Apple at the beginning of the Obama administration over price fixing of E books. That case took about three years start to finish. So I think that that's probably a good estimate. We an island of politico, Thanks for giving us a little bit of understanding on these cases against the social media companies and okay And thank you for joining us on Washington today, which is available as a podcast, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts and also download the free C span. Radio app toe. Listen on the go. Have a good evening. Reviews efforts to implement a national covert 19 vaccination plan. Then Hamline University political science professor David Schultz talks about his recent op ed, in which he argues the presidency has become too.