Report from Reuters
In Brief – Penske Media, which owns online publisher sites including Billboard, Rolling Stone, and Variety, has sued Google in federal court alleging that it is leveraging its online search monopoly to gain access to Penske’s content for the purpose of training its AI services and then using its AI to give “answers” at the top of its search engine results page, reducing internet traffic to Penske’s web properties. Media organizations have complained for months that new Google search features, including Google’s “AI Overviews,” siphon traffic away from their sites, eroding their advertising and subscription revenue. The lawsuit builds on the 2024 ruling in the US Department of Justice’s antitrust suit against Google for having a monopoly on general search and illegally bolstering it with anticompetitive business deals with device makers. The publisher argues that websites are not given a choice to withhold their content from Google AI training or their use in AI Overviews without also withdrawing from Google’s search engine, and doing so would close off a major source of traffic for many websites. Google counters that its AI-generated responses are popular with users and send vast amounts of traffic to publisher websites.
Context – The “fairness” of Google search has been a morass plaguing the Internet ecosystem for more than 20 years. Any change means winners and losers. AI Overviews appear to again be a mixed bag, with the company arguing that users benefit and other chatbot-builders are providing similar services. While Penske hopes to build on Federal District Judge Amit Mehta’s finding that Google illegally bolstered its search monopoly, the judge’s remedies order was limited, and most relevant to this lawsuit, he called out the rapid rise in AI chatbots and how the major ones are intermingling online search, including market-leader Chat-GPT. In Europe, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) authorizes EU officials to regulate Google search. Publishers are raising the same AI-related allegations and calling on European regulators to address the practices they call an abuse of Google’s dominance in search.