News publishers are joining forces to challenge Google for its alleged anticompetitive practices including AI use, accusing the company of jeopardizing their revenue streams.
Spearheaded by Arkansas-based Helena World Chronicle, the class-action lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in D.C., invoking the Sherman Act and other antitrust laws.
The lawsuit accuses Google of exploiting the readership, revenue, and content of news publishers through the Bard AI chatbot and Search Generative Experience (SGE) technologies.
News publishers stated that Google has been “siphoning off” content from them, which resulted in substantial losses financially. According to the lawsuit, these technologies intensify challenges for publishers, rather than fostering fair competition.
Older Google Technologies Also Considered Disruptive
The complaint focuses on the older technologies of Google, too, including the “Knowledge Graph” that it introduced in 2012. This database extracts data from the websites of news publishers without obtaining necessary consent.
By 2020, the Knowledge Graph had information about 5 billion entities with as many as 500 billion facts. A substantial part of these entries is claimed to be “misappropriated from Publishers”.
The lawsuit also states the other features of Google, including its “Featured Snippets” use advanced algorithms to extract information from websites. This prevents users from clicking on the actual link, thereby driving traffic away from the sites of the publishers.
With the inception of AI, the challenge for news publishers has further intensified.
The lawsuit cited a report published in The Wall Street Journal, stating that AI can answer queries of users as much as 75% of the time..
Users don’t even need to click on the link leading to the site. This way, Google drives 40% of the traffic away from these websites, leading to a significant drop in viewership and a financial loss.
The situation was further aggravated by the recent deal between OpenAI and Axel Springer, where the latter licensed its news as a proactive measure to train AI models.
Besides calling for a mandate for Google to obtain permission from publishers before they can use their website data to train AI products, the lawsuit has sought damage compensation.
The law firm handling the case challenged that Google’s actions harmed competition, labor, consumers, and a free press in the democratic nation.
The accusers have proposed some viable measures to make sure that publishers who decided to opt out of SGE will continue to appear in the search results of Google.
This lawsuit comes at a time when Google entered into an agreement with the government in Canada, promising to make an annual payment of $73.5 million to the country’s media for using their content.
Currently, news publishers are negotiating the deal with Meta, given that the social media platform blocked news websites in Canada over disputes for payments.
On the other hand, another lawsuit has been initiated against Google by the U.S. Justice Department for monopolizing digital ad technologies. It refers to the civil antitrust suit filed in 2020 over search advertising and searches.
It remains to be seen how Google responds to the lawsuit as news publishers collectively strive to restore completion and thrive in a free marketplace amidst evolving AI technologies.
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