Reuters
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The owners of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety sued Google on Friday, claiming that the tech giant's AI summary would use journalism without consent and reduce traffic to the website.
The lawsuit by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, DC, comes when a major US publisher first took Alphabet's Google to court over AI-generated summaries that appear above search results.
News organizations have said for months that new features, including Google's “AI Overview,” will leave the site, and new features will erode advertising and subscription revenue.
The family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske, whose content attracts 120 million online visitors a month, said Google would only include publisher websites in search results if articles are available in AI summaries.
Without leverage, Google would have to pay publishers the right to republish their work or use it to train AI systems, the company said. Google added that it was able to impose such conditions through search control, pointing to a federal court finding last year that the tech giant holds nearly 90% of the US search market.
“We are responsible for actively fighting for the future of digital media and maintaining its integrity. All of this is threatened by Google's current actions,” Penske says.
Approximately 20% of Google searches linking to the site outline AI and are expected to rise in share, adding that affiliate revenue had fallen more than a third from its peak by the end of 2024 due to a decline in search traffic.
Online education company Chegg also sued Google in February. SearchGiant's AI-generated summary claims to erode demand for the original content and undermine the publisher's competitive ability.
In response to Penske's lawsuit, Google said on Saturday that the AI overview will provide users with a better experience and send traffic to more and more different websites.
“An AI overview makes people feel that search is more useful, creates new opportunities to use it more and discover content. It defends against these unworthy claims,” said Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for Google.
The judge handed over a rare antitrust victory earlier this month by determining that there was no need to sell chrome browsers as part of an effort to open a search race.
The move has disappointed several publishers and industry groups. This includes the News/Media Alliance, which stated that the decision disables publishers' ability to opt out of AI overviews.
“It won't apply to Google as all the factors negotiated with all other AI companies don't apply to Google,” Danielle Coffey, CEO of the News/Media Alliance, a trading group representing more than 2,200 US-based publishers, told Reuters Friday.
“If you have the massive scale and market power that Google has, you don't have to comply with the same norms. That's the problem.”
Coffey has mentioned AI licensing companies such as ChatGpt-Maker Openai and has signed with News Corp, Financial Times, The Atlantic and others. Google, where Gemini Chatbot competes with ChatGpt, was slow to sign such a transaction.
