Antitrust Complaint Filed Against Google’s AI Overview In EU: All You Need To Know

Google’s AI powered overviews have been hit by an antitrust complaint from a coalition of independent publishers in the European Union, according to a report by Reuters. The publishers have urged for an interim measure to allegedly prevent Google from abusing its market dominance.

Antitrust laws are regulations that encourage competition in the market by limiting the market power of any particular firm.

As per the document, "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." 

The complaint lodged with the European Commission states that AI features are siphoning traffic and revenue from publishers, and threatening the viability of independent journalism.

What is the feature?

First introduced as an experiment termed Search Generative Experience (SGE) in May 2023, the feature is now used in over 100 countries. 

The AI overview feature generates summaries from available information that appear above the hyperlinks for the searched keywords. The feature was integrated as part of Google’s bid to employ Generative AI into its search engine. The key aspect of this feature is to give quick and holistic information pertaining to the query from multiple sources. 

What do the Publishers Allege?

The publishers allege that they are devoid of the option to “not allow Google from using their material 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,” reported Reuters. 

The publisher's complaint states that the feature will lead to less traffic on their page as the user would have less incentive to click on the websites. This would decrease their revenues and subscriber revenues causing “serious irreparable harm.”

In May 2024, Google commenced placing ads over these overviews, which the publishers claim to be directly incentivising the content produced by them. The document reveals that the publishers have no choice in the matter as they cannot opt out without getting removed from Google’s top search results. Doing so would make them invisible on the platform. 

The complainants include the Independent Publishers Alliance, the Movement for an Open Web and British non-profit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company. 

Google has claimed that claims about traffic from search are often based on highly incomplete and skewed data, reported Reuters. 

What do the Regulators Say?

The UK's Competition and Markets Authority confirmed receipt of the complaint. Google has claimed that it directs billions of clicks to the website each day. 

The European Commission had also previously investigated Google for anticompetitive practices. The CMA could potentially regulate Google from using publishers' content.