Groups representing publishers have file antitrust complaints with the European Commission and the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority over Google’s AI Overviews, which they argued was an abuse of Google’s dominant position in online search.
The groups have also asked for an interim measure to prevent irreparable harm.
The complaints concern Google’s AI Overviews feature, introduced in May of last year, which use information gleaned from websites to create AI-generated summaries related to a user’s query that are displayed at the top of a search results page.
AI summaries
The feature has been rolled out in more than 100 countries and publishers have long argued that it poses a threat to them as it makes users less likely to click through to the site hosting the original content.
Publishers have levelled similar accusations against AI start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI, but in Google’s case the situation is more complex because Google is using data that also sends users through to publishers’ sites through search links.
The EU complaint from the Independent Publishers Alliance alleges Google is “misusing web content” for its AI products.
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” says the complaint, according to a Reuters report.
The summaries are positioned above search results, disadvantaging the original publisher material they are based on, the complaint alleges.
“Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” says the complaint, which is dated 30 June.
‘Irreparable harm’
It requests interim measures to prevent serious irreparable harm to competition and access to news.
The Independent Publishers Alliance website says it is a nonprofit organisation advocating for unnamed independent publishers.
The complaint was also signed by the Movement for an Open Web, which represents advertisers and publishers, and British non-profit Foxglove, which says it promotes fairness in the tech industry.
Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling said Google’s AI Overviews posed an “existential threat” to independent news.
She said the complaint was being submitted to authorities in the EU and other jurisdictions to “allow independent journalism to opt out”.
The UK’s CMA said it had received the complaint.
Google said claims about lost traffic could be based on incomplete or skewed data, and that sites can lose traffic for “a variety of reasons”.
The company was convicted in the US last year of misusing its dominant position in search to maintain an illegal monopoly and could be forced to sell its Android smartphone OS or its Chrome browser, or face other penalties.
AI disruption
AI start-ups have faced similar claims of misusing publisher information, with Anthropic sued by Reddit last month for scraping data without the social media firm’s consent.
Online infrastructure provider Cloudflare last week said it would begin blocking AI bots for new publisher customers by default, in a move hailed by publishers as a step toward creating a better balance with AI companies.