Google is facing a new lawsuit accusing the company of using news publishers’ content to create a summary of AI that undermines its business.
The lawsuit comes from Penske Media (PMC), which owns industry publications such as Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe and Artforum. Penske’s suit was the first target to target Google and its parent company Alphabet, searching for an AI-generated summary, but publishers and authors are suing other AI companies over related copyright concerns.
Since launching AI overview last year, Google has been criticized for threatening the business model of the same publisher that it relies on to provide the content needed to produce accurate AI summaries and answers.
The new lawsuit goes further by accusing Google of “continuing to exercise its monopoly to force PMCs to allow PMC content to be republished in AI overviews, and continuing to use that content to train AI models.
Google spokesman José Castañeda said in a statement that the AI overview would make Google “more useful” and would create “discover new opportunities for content.”
“Every day, Google sends billions of clicks to sites on the web, and AI overviews send traffic to more diverse sites,” says Castañeda. “We defend against these unworthy claims.”
In the lawsuit, Penske has craved the website with “exchange of traffic access,” a “basic bargain supporting the production of content on open commercial webs,” but recently “is trying to “connect participation in this bargain to another transaction that PMC and other publishers aren’t intended.”
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“As a condition for indexing publisher content for search, Google requires publishers to provide its content to other uses that cannibalize or preempt referrals,” the lawsuit alleges, adding that the only way Penske cannibalizes its content is to remove it from Google search entirely.
The lawsuit alleges that Penske has “has significantly reduced clicks from Google search since Google began rolling out its AI overview.” This means publishers are getting less advertising revenue, and it also threatens subscription and affiliate revenue. Pensek said:
Google also opposed complaints that AI overview would reduce traffic to publishers, but the lawsuit states that “Google does not provide reliable competitive information on search referral traffic.”
Penske’s lawsuit found a federal judge illegally acting the company to maintain monopoly in online searches after it appears Google has dodged antitrust bullets, but the judge did not order the company to dissolve the business due to some of the increased competition in AI.
