Report from Reuters
In Brief – Federal District Judge Amit Mehta, who found that Google held a monopoly in internet search in 2024, has dismissed a private antitrust lawsuit brough by two online publishers who alleged that the search giant unlawfully used their content for AI-generated summaries that then diverted readers from their websites and reduced their on-site ad revenues. Mehta’s latest ruling says that the antitrust claims “fail to get out of the starting gate.” He rejected the arguments of Chegg, an education content company, and Penske, the publisher of media sites including Rolling Stone, saying the companies had only an “expectation” that Google would send them search traffic in exchange for making content freely available, but that Google was under no obligation to index publishers’ material on their preferred terms. The judge said he was not unsympathetic to publishers whose work is reused without compensation, but said antitrust law cannot replace legislators’ authority to address impacts of technological innovation.
Context – The chatbot-search convergence is well underway, something Mehta discussed at length in his 2025 antitrust remedies order that rejected breaking up Google, and it was always going to be an especially bumpy ride for Google. Linking traditional search results to its ability to access data for AI raised hackles from publishers everywhere. European antitrust regulators were always more likely that US judges to take a hard line. In June, the UK CMA ordered Google to make changes to its AI-powered search features to provide clearer attribution and direct links to publisher content in AI-generated search results and to offer publishers an effective and granular opt-out of AI results without any ranking penalties in traditional search. Google then rolled out policy changes it says complies with the CMA rules and are being applied globally. EU regulators are engaged in their own antitrust review of Google search and AI and are asking online publishers about the Google changes made to address the CMA’s rules. We expect the Commission will ask for more and impose “interim measures” on Google relatively soon.