The State of Ohio has filed a lawsuit seeking something no American court has ever approved: government control over the editorial judgments of a private search engine. Ohio has asked its state courts to declare Google Search a “common carrier,” stripping Google of the discretion to determine what information appears on its search results pages.

An Ohio trial court rightly rejected that invitation, holding that Google is not a common carrier under Ohio law. Ohio appealed that ruling, and Cato has now filed an amicus brief in support of Google (with thanks to our Ohio local counsel David Lockshaw). Our brief focuses on why forcing Google Search to operate as a common carrier would violate Google’s First Amendment rights.

In our brief, we explain that Ohio’s legal theory rests on the discredited view that the government has an obligation to guarantee equal rights of access to private publications. This theory was championed by progressive commentators in the 1960s and 1970s, but now it is ironically conservative states like Ohio that are leading the charge. As our brief explains, such efforts violate the First Amendment because they interfere with a private platform’s rights of editorial control. The Supreme Court has held that a newspaper has a right to choose which op-eds it publishes and that a parade has a right to choose which floats it hosts. A private website like Google has just the same right to decide what does and does not appear on every Google Search results webpage.

Our brief further explains that Google Search cannot be a “common carrier” under any traditional meaning of that term. Google Search is inherently customized, and core to its functionality is the tailoring of results to individual users. Unlike a telegram service that merely carries messages point-to-point, Google Search crafts a unique page for each user with each new search. That editorial control makes Google Search unlike any service that has ever previously been treated like a common carrier.

Accepting Ohio’s position would inaugurate a new and destabilizing model of state power over digital information. If Google Search may be judicially redesigned according to government-prescribed “neutrality,” then so may every other service that organizes and presents information from others: search engines, recommendation tools, news feeds, comparison platforms, online marketplaces, and AI-driven retrieval systems. Ohio’s approach would damage the competitive landscape, suppress innovation, and chill the editorial discretion that drives diverse information services in a free society.

This Court should affirm the decision below. But it should also be clear about the constitutional stakes: Ohio’s theory would give governments the power to control the editorial decisions of a private organization. The First Amendment forecloses that result.