Report from Reuters
In Brief – The Independent Publishers Alliance, a UK-based trade group of small independent publishers, has filed antitrust complaints against Google with the European Commission and the UK Competition and Markets Authority accusing Google of misusing content gathered from publisher websites for use by the search engine to generate its “AI Overviews” that are placed at the top of Google search results. The complaints allege that Google’s AI Overviews are reducing traffic to publisher websites and therefore a loss of revenue. The publishers note that websites are not given a choice to withhold their content from Google training their large language models or generating 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-generate responses send vast amounts of traffic to publisher websites, with a spokesperson saying, “New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered.”
Context – The “fairness” of search has been a morass plaguing the Internet ecosystem for more than 20 years. Most web businesses get a large share of traffic through search, meaning Google. Every change means winners and losers. AI Overviews appear to again be a mixed bag. For decades, the company has argued that changes were intended to improve user experience. But web businesses with falling traffic become unhappy. Empowered by the Digital Markets Act(DMA), EU regulators appear set to wade into how Google should operate search, essentially like a regulated utility. The initial focus has been on “vertical search” competitors, but publishers complained about AI Overviews at a recent Commission meeting on Google’s DMA compliance. Between the online search impacts of Chat-GPT, the market-leading chatbot by far, and AI-enabled search start-ups such as Perplexity, Google is certain to argue that AI will inevitably be a bigger part of search and that it is working to support the healthiest ecosystem for all users. The UK CMA andUS judges will be entering the chat as well.