Google has won an Ohio appellate ruling that rejected former state Attorney General David Yost's bid to revive a lawsuit seeking to treat its search results as a regulated “common carrier.” The 5th Appellate District upheld a lower court's dismissal, finding Google doesn't transport others' property like a utility but creates its own expressive product through crawling, ranking, and formatting, which the judges called curation, not carriage. It added that common-carrier rules are a poor fit for a free service that doesn't depend on user payments, and that imposing them would implicate Google's First Amendment right to editorial control. The case dates to 2021 and cited a study claiming about 65% of Google searches ended without a click elsewhere, predating the AI Overviews that have sharpened that dynamic since.
