Can a Mississippi newspaperman prevail over Google?
Published 2:29 am Sunday, July 27, 2025
Federal District Judge Amit P. Mehta in Washington, D.C., will soon decide if Mississippi’s Wyatt Emmerich will be a potential St. George about to slay the Google dragon or just a modern Don Quixote hopelessly tilting at Google windmills.
Google, of course, is the colossal technology company that dominates online advertising, search engine technology, and more.
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Emmerich is the Harvard educated, third generation scion of the Mississippi newspaper publishing family of the same name who abandoned a Wall Street career to take over the family business.
Mehta has gained notoriety for presiding over cases related to the January 6th U.S. Capitol attack and the Department of Justice antitrust case in which he ruled “Google is a monopolist” in search and advertising markets.
Emmerich Newspapers Inc. and Helena World Chronicle LLC, a 100-year-old Helena, Arkansas, newspaper, filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google and its parent company Alphabet in Mehta’s court. Speaking to the North Jackson Rotary Club, Emmerich said the potential class-action civil lawsuit represents $300 billion in prospective claims.
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“We’re fighting for intellectual property rights and the future of local news,” he said, arguing that it is in Google’s best interest to settle the lawsuit. “Our goal is to institute a system of micro royalty payments.”
The court record is fascinating. The newspapers’ complaint claims Google “siphons off billions in traffic from Publishers by extracting, repackaging and republishing their news content on a royalty-free basis.”
Google filed a motion to dismiss arguing primarily that the local newspapers do not have standing to file an antitrust suit: “Each of the counts fails to state a claim for multiple reasons.”
The newspapers responded they do have standing and that as a result of Google’s monopolistic actions, “Publishers are being driven from the market in droves, to the detriment of American journalism.”
See the amended complaint and following motions at https://archive.org/details/gov.uscourts.dcd.262813/gov.uscourts.dcd.262813.27.0.pdf
“We are awaiting Judge Mehta’s ruling,” Emmerich said. “We feel good about our prospects for surviving the motion to dismiss and then the next big hurdle is class certification. If we are certified as a class, we will represent every news producer in the United States. It will be a mega lawsuit. If we’re not certified, we want enough people signed on that we still keep the interest of our attorneys. Our attorneys are rated among the best.” Mississippi lawyer Don Barrett of tobacco settlement fame is one of them. So far, Emmerich says, 84 newspapers in 13 states have signed on.
St. George or Don Quixote? Mehta will decide.
Crawford is the author of “A Republican’s Lament: Mississippi Needs Good Government Conservatives.”
