It appears that Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood is making a strategic retreat in the wake of publicity about his investigation of Google.
On Friday morning, Google sued Hood, saying that a 79-page subpoena he had sent to the company was "punitive," and violated Google's First and Fourth Amendment rights. The company also pointed to recent press reports that showed Hollywood studios had lobbied heavily for the investigation.
Later that day, Hood sent a statement to The New York Times saying that he's "calling a time out, so that cooler heads may prevail." Hood says he wants to negotiate a "peaceful resolution to the issues affecting consumers" that he and other state AGs have pointed out in a series of letters.
Even as he acknowledges it's time to stand down, the letter spends a few paragraphs attacking Google. Copyright infringement—the studios' top concern—isn't mentioned anywhere in the statement. Instead, the focus is on drug abuse. Hood says that "more needs to be done" when it comes to cleaning up search results. The statement reads, in part:
Today if a child types in the query "buy drugs," the first site populated is silkroad.org, which suggests alternatives for buying drugs. The second is canadadrugs.com, which is the same website from which my undercover agents purchased controlled amphetamines without a prescription in June of 2012. Our investigators used Google's autocomplete suggestion to find this website not requiring a prescription. Not only was this website listed in the search results, but it was also shown in the results margin as an advertiser. In other words, Google is raking in advertising dollars off of drug dealers, the same crime that the company was on probation for under a plea agreement with the federal government and the Rhode Island Attorney General... Google agreed to pay half a billion dollars in a fine to avoid a possible felony.
In hopes of continuing to work with Google, without any fanfare or press release, my Consumer Protection Division issued an administrative subpoena asking for documents. Google sent more than 99,000 jumbled, unsearchable documents in a data dump. I agreed to give Google additional time to comply with our request and hoped we could reach an agreement. Instead, after the Sony hack, Google's General Counsel Kent Walker began blogging and feeding the media a salacious Hollywood tale. Now, feeling emboldened with its billions of dollars, media prowess and political power, some of its more excitable people have sued trying to stop the State of Mississippi for daring to ask some questions. We expect more from one of the wealthiest corporations in the world.
That's an interesting interpretation of the timeline of events, but in this case the idea that it was Google who planted the press reports about the MPAA-Hood connection is extremely hard to believe. Walker's blog post is dated December 18—several days after press reports, in The New York Times and elsewhere, began to note the ties between his investigation and MPAA lobbyists. It was Walker who cited the media reports, not vice versa.
Hood concludes by asking the public to read his earlier letters to Google and "reach their own conclusions about Google's conduct."