Ohio Court Upholds Ruling that Google Search is Not a Common Carrier

On June 8, 2026, the Ohio Court of Appeals for the Fifth Appellate District unanimously affirmed a lower court ruling in State ex rel. Yost v. Google, L.L.C. (2026-Ohio-2148), rejecting Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost's argument that Google's search engine qualifies as a common carrier under Ohio common law. Under Ohio's established two-part test, a common carrier must (1) actually transport the property of others and (2) hold itself out to serve the public without discrimination—and the court found Google Search fails on both counts. On the first prong, the court held that Google does not "transport" anything; instead, it crawls the web, builds proprietary indexes, and assembles a curated Search Results Page (SRP) that is Google's own expressive product, not the unaltered property of any third party. On the second prong, the court found that Google does not serve users "indifferently" because its ranking and presentation decisions involve editorial judgment—and, in any event, because Google's core service is free to users, there is no traditional "rate" for a court to regulate. The court declined the Attorney General's broader invitation to treat Google as a business "affected with a public interest" under the expansive standard the U.S. Supreme Court articulated in Munn v. Illinois (1876), holding that such a step would require the judiciary to make complex technology and speech policy better suited to the legislature. Two additional concerns reinforced the court's restraint: imposing common carrier status on a search engine would likely conflict with federal law, which classifies search engines as "information services" not subject to telecommunications common carrier regulation, and would raise serious First Amendment concerns by compelling Google to carry or rank speech it would otherwise choose to exclude.