A class-action lawsuit was filed this week against Google and parent company Alphabet claiming anticompetitive practices, violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and other laws by news publishers. The case, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, alleges that Google is depriving news publishers of their content, readers, and ad revenue through anticompetitive means. It specifically cites new AI technologies such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbot as exacerbating the problem.
Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, argues in the complaint that Google is harming the free press by sharing publishers’ content on Google, resulting in significant financial losses.
The lawsuit also highlights Google’s older question-and-answer technologies, including the “Knowledge Graph” launched in May 2012, as part of the issue.
The complaint states, “Google compiled this massive database by extracting information from Publishers’ websites — what Google calls ‘materials shared across the web’ —and from ‘open source and licensed databases,’” alleging that much of the information in the Knowledge Graph was “misappropriated from Publishers.”
The suit also raises concerns around other Google technologies, such as “Featured Snippets,” which are believed to divert traffic away from publishers’ websites.
One of the key concerns addressed by the lawsuit is the potential impact of AI on publishers’ businesses. A recent report by The Wall Street Journal highlighted that 75% of the time when Google’s AI answers a user’s query, it does not require a click-through to the publisher’s website, resulting in potential traffic loss. This could significantly impact publishers, as Google currently drives nearly 40% of their traffic according to data from Similarweb. Some publishers are attempting to address this issue by licensing their news for AI model training.
The lawsuit asserts that Google’s recent AI-based search advancements were implemented with the intent of discouraging end-users from visiting the websites of digital news and publishing outlets.
In addition to seeking damages, the suit requests an injunction requiring Google to obtain consent from publishers to use their website data to train its artificial intelligence products, among other demands.
The case is filed following Google’s recent agreement with the Canadian government to pay Canadian media for their content, as well as alongside the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google for monopolizing digital ad technologies. The law firm handling the case, Hausfeld, contends that “the anticompetitive effects of Google’s scheme cause profound harm to competition, to consumers, to labor, and to a democratic free press.”
Google has not yet provided a comment in response to the lawsuit.
The complaint can be viewed here.
