A new class-action lawsuit filed this week in US District Court in DC accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of engaging in anti-competitive behavior in violation of US antitrust laws, the Sherman Act and others, on behalf of news publishers. The lawsuit, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, alleges that Google is “locking out” news publishers’ content, their readers and advertising revenue through anti-competitive means. He also specifically cites new AI technologies such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and the Bard AI chatbot as exacerbating the problem.
In the complaint, the Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, alleges that Google is “starving the free press” by sharing publishers’ content on Google, losing them “billions of dollars.”
In addition to new AI technologies, the suit cites Google’s older question-and-answer technologies, such as the “Knowledge Graph” launched in May 2012, as part of the problem.
“When a user searches for information on a topic, Google displays a ‘Knowledge Panel’ to the right of the search results. This panel contains a summary of content derived from the Knowledge Graph database,” the complaint states. this massive database by extracting information from Publisher websites — what Google calls “materials shared on the web” — and from “open source and license databases,” he says.
By 2020, the Knowledge Graph had grew up in 500 billion events for 5 billion entities. However, much of the “collective intelligence” that Google leveraged was content that was “misused by publishers,” the complaint alleges.
Other Google technologies, such as Featured Snippets, where Google algorithmically extracts answers from web pages, were also cited as driving traffic away from publisher sites.
Most important, perhaps, is addressing how AI will affect publishers’ businesses. The problem was recently analyzed in a report Thursday by the Wall Street Journal, which led with a shocking statistic. When the online magazine The Atlantic modeled what would happen if Google integrated AI into search, it found that 75% of the time the AI answered the user’s query without requiring a click to their website, losing them traffic. This could have a significant impact on publishers’ traffic in the future, as Google currently drives nearly 40% of their traffic, according to data from Similarweb.
Some publishers are now trying to address the problem. For example, Axel Springer just this week signed a deal with OpenAI to license its news for training AI models. But overall, publishers believe they will lose somewhere between 20-40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products are fully rolled out, the WSJ report notes.
The lawsuit echoes that concern, arguing that Google’s recent advances in AI-powered search were implemented with the “purpose of discouraging end users from visiting Class Members’ websites that are part of the digital news and publishing line of commerce.”
SGE, he argues, offers web searchers a way to search for information in a conversation, but ultimately keeps users in Google’s “walled garden” as it “plagiarizes” their content. Publishers also cannot block SGE because it uses the same web crawler as Google’s general search service, GoogleBot.
Additionally, it says Google’s Bard AI was trained on a dataset that included “news, magazines and digital publications,” citing both 2023 report by the News Media Alliance and a Washington Post article about AI training data; for reference. (The Post, which worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI, had found that news and media sites were the third largest category of AI training data.)
The case highlights other concerns, such as changing AdSense rates and proving improper evidence theft on Google’s part by destroying chat messages — an issue raised in Epic Games’ recent antitrust lawsuit against Google app stores, which Epic Won.
In addition to damages, the lawsuit seeks injunctive relief that would require Google to obtain publishers’ consent to use their website data to train its general artificial intelligence products, including Google’s and competitors’ products. It also asks Google to allow publishers excluded from the SGE to still appear in Google search results, among other things.
The US lawsuit follows deal Google reached last month with the Canadian government which would see the search giant pay Canadian media to use their content. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will provide $73.5 million (C$100 million) each year to news organizations in the country, with the funds distributed based on the news agency’s headcount. Negotiations with Meta have yet to be resolved, although Meta began blocking news in Canada in August in light of pressure to pay for content under the new Canadian law.
The case comes alongside the filing of the U.S Justice Department lawsuit against Google on the monopoly of digital advertising technologies and refers to the Department of Justice of 2020 civil antitrust action over search and search advertising (which are different markets than digital ad technologies in the latest suit).
“The anticompetitive effects of Google’s system are seriously harming competition, consumers, labor, and a democratic free press,” says a announcement posted on the website of the law firm handling the case, Hausfeld.
“Plaintiff Helena World Chronicle, LLC invokes the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to seek monetary and injunctive relief to restore and ensure competition for digital news and reporting publications and to create guardrails to maintain a free marketplace of ideas in the new era artificial intelligence,” he says.
Google has been asked for comment, but has yet to provide one.
The complaint is available below.
Helena World Chronicle, LLC vs. Google LLC and Alphabet Inc with TechCrunch on Scribd
