Summary: Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood has put his legal fight with Google on hold for the time being after Google sues him.
The attorney general for Mississippi, Jim Hood, said that he has put his legal fight against Google on hold for the time being, according to The Guardian.
The announcement came not long after Google filed a lawsuit against Hood.
Hood has been fighting with Google regarding third-party information that is available through its search and advertising services. He wants the tech giant to limit the info available through those two entities.
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Google claims that Hood’s request violates the open principles of the internet and was only made when a lobbying firm pushed him to do so.
“In an attempt to resolve some of the problems the states’ chief law enforcement officers have raised,” Hood said in a letter. “I am calling a time out, so that cooler heads may prevail.”
Hood also said he will be contacting the legal team at Google “to negotiate a peaceful resolution.”
Hood filed a 79-page subpoena on October 27 that claimed Mississippi had reasonable grounds to believe the company violated the consumer protections act of the state. The subpoena also asked Google to turnover information about its search engine and the sales of illegal drugs, pornography and other items.
In the lawsuit filed by Google against Hood, the company said that the subpoena was “an enormously burdensome subpoena” and that the complaints filed by Hood are not within the jurisdiction of the state law.
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Google has also accused Hood of violating federal law when he tried to intervene in the company’s search results at the bidding of the Motion Picture Association of America. The New York Times acquired documents from open records requests and the Sony hack that show the MPAA started a lobbying group, Project Goliath, that pressured attorney generals to fight Google with subpoenas.
An MPAA spokesperson, Kate Bedingfield, released the following statement in response to the Google lawsuit against Hood:
“Google’s effort to position itself as a defender of free speech is shameful. Freedom of speech should never be used as a shield for unlawful activities and the internet is not a license to steal.”
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In the lawsuit, Google said, “… If a state attorney general can punish, irrespective of well-established federal law, any search engine or video-sharing platform whenever he finds third-party content he deems objectionable, search engines and video-sharing platforms cannot operate in their current form.”
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