Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh, who attended a Justice Department meeting with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, said the discussion at times veered in a worrisome direction. | Mark Wilson/Getty Images Technology Democratic AGs warn Sessions against policing tech speech

Two Democratic state officials on Tuesday warned Attorney General Jeff Sessions against policing the way tech companies handle content on their platforms after they said Sessions repeatedly brought up concerns that the firms are politically biased.

The warning followed a high-profile Justice Department meeting between Sessions and a group of more than a dozen state officials, including nine AGs. Other Democrats in attendance said the discussion focused on their concerns around tech company privacy violations and market dominance.


Maryland Attorney General Brian Frosh and District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine told reporters after the meeting that the discussion at times veered in a worrisome direction as Sessions brought up concerns that the firms are politically biased.

Frosh said there was consensus that tech companies' economic power and privacy issues raise concerns, but added, “I at least, and I know a few others, strongly disagree that the government, the Justice Department should be attempting to stifle political speech in any way whatsoever."

The Justice Department's readout of the meeting made no mention of tech bias but said it expects the dialogue to continue.

"Each state attorney general’s office shared their views of the important issues for federal and state authorities to consider when addressing these evolving technologies," DOJ said in a statement. "The discussion principally focused on consumer protection and data privacy issues, and the bipartisan group of attendees sought to identify areas of consensus."

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Representatives for most of the Republican state officials who were present at the meeting either declined to comment or did not respond to inquiries. Spokespeople for the AGs of Utah and Louisiana referred questions to the Justice Department.

"To the degree that there was any consensus, it is that we still have a lot to learn about how to best protect consumer interests in this context," Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said in a statement.

The DOJ meeting came amid escalating GOP claims that the country's biggest internet companies are suppressing conservative views that run counter to the beliefs of left-leaning Silicon Valley. Such GOP accusations of systematic bias — made without evidence and denied by the companies — have picked up pace heading into the midterm elections.

President Donald Trump has embraced the conservative grievances in recent months. He's lashed out at Google, saying the company manipulates news search results to portray him in a bad light, and he's targeted Twitter with claims that it "shadow bans" conservatives, reducing the visibility of their accounts. In an interview last month, Trump suggested Amazon, Facebook and Google are in a “very antitrust situation,” though he declined to say whether they should be broken up.

Democratic state officials also displayed a growing interest in scrutinizing the tech industry, though for different reasons.

California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who state is home to Google, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants, said the AGs spent most of the meeting talking about their concerns over how internet companies handle, share and profit from people's personal information. According to Becerra, they batted around ideas for how antitrust law could be applied big tech firms — including breaking them up — but said there was little consensus on the right approach.

“Everyone sees the growth of the industry as something that has become of interest to regulators and enforcers," adding it's still an "open question" how antitrust law might apply.

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood, who filed a lawsuit against Google last year alleging the company improperly collected data on students via its education software, said states should pool their efforts.

“We attorneys general mostly were unanimous in what our focus should be, to look at antitrust and privacy issues" in tech, Hood said, adding he suggested they "form a working group and perhaps enter into a memorandum of understanding so we can share information."

Multiple AGs described the conversations as still in the early stages, but increased coordination among state law enforcement officials could amount to a sizable headache for the tech industry, especially if it leads to formal investigations of the business practices.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, whose future at DOJ remains in question ahead of a Thursday meeting with President Donald Trump, sat in on the tech meeting, and DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim was also in the room.

Tech industry representatives have criticized the DOJ meeting.

"At a time when the misuse of governmental power to pursue personal or partisan agendas is increasingly understood to constitute a threat to the rule of law, and the stability of our nation, a meeting that appears to use anti-trust enforcement power to intimidate free speech is a particularly bad idea,” Ed Black, president of the Computer & Communications Industry Association, said ahead of the DOJ gathering. His group represents companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

As Sessions huddled with the state officials, other top regulators were just across town raising the prospect of more rigorous antitrust enforcement for the tech industry. The Federal Trade Commission is concerned about the “significant” anti-competitive threats posed by tech giants buying smaller startups, agency Chairman Joe Simons said Tuesday in remarks at Georgetown Law School.

“This is a difficult area. It's an important area, and it's an area that we're going to be spending some resources thinking about what to do and how to bring cases," Simons said.

FTC action to block or revisit such Goliath-buys-David deals could disrupt what’s historically been one of the most potent growth engines for the tech industry. YouTube and Instagram, for instance, were both young startups when Google and Facebook, respectively, bought them.

Appearing before Simons at the same Georgetown Law event, EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager underscored the global nature of the antitrust pressure facing the tech industry.

She said Google earned itself a mammoth $5 billion EU fine this summer for having “held back innovation” by bundling its search product and Android operating system, among other behaviors. And her office is currently examining Amazon over the heaps of data it gathers on the “small guy” third-party sellers on its e-commerce platform, she said.

“It’s true that our markets and laws are different from those here in the U.S. Sometimes they’re very different," she said. "But we all need to deal with the same new technologies, so I think we have a lot to gain from learning from one another.“

Kyle Daly and Nancy Scola contributed to this report.

