Hello and welcome to another MLEX podcast. I'm James Panicki, MLEX's Australasian managing editor,

coming to you from our offices in Melbourne, Australia. Great to have your company. And as our readers know only too well,

it has been a regulatory roller coaster ride for Facebook and Google

in the United States over the past few weeks.

Google has received an official request for documents and information

from the US Department of Justice.

Its YouTube has paid $170 million privacy settlement, a controversially low amount,

if compared to the Federal Trade Commission's $5 billion settlement with Facebook in July.

But possibly the biggest development in recent weeks has been the interest by state attorneys

general in antitrust developments concerning Facebook and Google.

And there have been a couple of developments on this front just recently.

We're recording this on Monday afternoon on the US side of the dateline.

To discuss these dynamics, I'm joined from our San Francisco offices by Mike Swift, M-Lex's

chief global risk correspondent. Hello, Mike.

Hey, James.

Now, let's start with today's developments.

What's been going on?

So today was really a red-letter day in the investigation of Google.

Basically, it was announced today that 48 of the U.S. states are joining

a probe of the search giant. And initially, they're going to look at Google's advertising

business, but they made clear that we're going to follow the facts wherever they lead. A number of states

said they're interested in privacy issues as much as competition issues. So it's really kind of

...