Google sues Mississippi attorney general

Google on Friday filed a lawsuit against Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood (D) over what the tech giant claims is an attempt to censor the Internet.

The Web titan is accusing Hood of coordinating with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) to hassle Google with a subpoena asking for details about how it takes down advertisements and search results for illegal drugs, pirated content and other contraband online.

{mosads}Documents revealed in the massive hack at Sony Pictures seem to paint a cozy relationship between the Hollywood trade group and some attorneys general. On Thursday, Google said that the MPAA was trying to work with state officials to “secretly revive” a controversial intellectual property law and aiming to “censor the Internet.”

In its Friday lawsuit, Google said Hood “has threatened to prosecute, sue or investigate” Google and its subsidies for the last 18 months, and more recently issued an “enormously burdensome” subpoena about its processes for taking down ads. Those actions came after “a sustained lobbying effort” from the MPAA, Google said. 

The company wants a Mississippi court to block that subpoena and prevent the state from filing any possible charges against Google over the types of material it hosts.

“[I]f 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,” Google said.

“We regret having to take this matter to court, and we are doing so only after years of efforts to explain both the merits of our position and the extensive steps we’ve taken on our platforms,” Google executive Kent Walker wrote in a blog post on Friday. 

The coordination between states and the MPAA was revealed in documents obtained by The Verge in recent weeks. The efforts seemed to show an attempt to revive portions of the Stop Online Piracy Act, which was killed in Congress in 2012 amid heated opposition from Silicon Valley.  

Hood has previously rejected any accusations that he has been in bed with the trade group.

The group “has no major influence on my decision-making,” he told The Huffington Post this week. “They’re just reporting wrongdoing.”