Independent Publishers say Google’s AI Overviews are leaving them in a no win situation — and they are taking their fight to EU regulators.
The Independent Publishers Alliance (45 members), non-profit big tech watchdog Foxglove Group and U.K. based non-profit advocacy organization Movement for an Open Web have filed a complaint with the European Commission, the U.K. Competition Markets Authority and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, requesting that they take immediate action to prevent what they call irreparable damage caused by Google’s AI Overviews.
Since Google AI Overviews started rolling out in the UK.last October the alliance has collected evidence to include in the lawsuit, which reveals that AI Overviews have a detrimental effect on independent publisher’s sites and that opting out has a direct correlation with a publisher’s search index placement. The report will be released in the coming days.
The document, dated 30 June, to the European Commission and seen by Digiday, requests that the regulator impose two specific conduct requirements to Google: that Google enable opt-out from crawling, scraping, and ingesting publishers’ content for AI capabilities while ensuring that news publication organizations continue to index and be shown on a nondiscriminatory, as part of Google Search. The second request is that Google compensate all publisher content fairly.
“What’s important is that the current illegality [of unauthorized content scraping] be stopped now that the option out is provided. This means that you can refuse to have your data crawled, and remain in Google search indexing, so you’re wiped off of the internet,” Rosa Curling a lawyer, Foxglove co-founder, and director, told Digiday]
Curling emphasized that there must be a proper negotiation between the big tech firms and publishers to determine what is a fair deal in terms of compensation. They did not give dollar amounts. Instead, they stressed that the goal was to enable opt-outs without jeopardizing search visibility for publishers.
What’s happening is that Google is just stealing the data and regurgitating them, and if anyone tries to assert their own rights, they are removed from the search indexing. She said that this is what is fundamentally wrong and in violation of competition about what is happening now. Google’s spokesperson said that many of the claims about search traffic are “highly incomplete” or based on distorted data. Sites can gain or lose traffic for many reasons, such as seasonal demand and regular algorithmic changes.
A Google spokesperson responded to a request for comment about this story by saying that Google sends out “billions” of clicks daily. The statement stated that “new AI experiences in search allow people to ask more questions, creating new opportunities for businesses and content to be discovered.” Google spokesperson said that AI is now an integral part of Google Search, and the best way for web publishers control access is to use the robots.txt to manage how Googlebot scans their site. Publishers can also use the snippet settings in order to restrict the appearance of their content on features such as AI Overviews or experimental AI Mode.
Publishers can see if Googlebot has been added to their site, but it does not reveal what it is for. It could be search or AI. The rub is.
Foxglove has been working with other regulators in South Africa, Germany, and other countries to ensure that Google can’t “jurisdiction-hop” on this matter, said Curling. She added that they have also kept in touch with the DOJ whose recent antitrust decision against Google’s monopoly in ad tech had “positive ripple effect” for other lobbyists.
Curling said, “What’s important is that the courts catch up with the current situation.” She added that immediate remedies were needed to prevent publishers from going bankrupt in the short-term while these investigations were underway.
The new frontier of regulatory scrutiny is Generative AI
The latest EU complaint by independent publishers marks a third major antitrust battle that Google could face. The Department of Justice is currently deciding what behavioral remedies are appropriate in two other lawsuits that target Google’s dominance in search and ad technology. The latest EU complaint, however, marks a deeper shift of regulatory mood.
Up until now, global antitrust actions against Google have focused largely on traditional power plays – default search engine contracts and the control over the digital advertising stack. As generative AI transforms the way content is surfaced, monetized and distributed, regulators will need to pay attention to the next front. This includes AI overviews, LLM (learning-by-doing) training and the impact of publisher traffic and revenue.
In the past, regulators, lawmakers and the industry as a whole have responded to yesterday’s issues, rather than those of tomorrow, said Paul Bannister. Chief strategy officer at Raptive. He added that “AI is the future battleground.” “If the industry must wait 10 years before regulatory and legislative solutions are implemented, then half of the companies will be out of business due to the actions taken by big technology right now.”
The success of these investigations will depend on how hard Google will fight, Bannister added. He said that the CMA had made good progress with its investigation into Google’s cookie deprecation plan, but that Google might not be as cooperative regarding AI. “AI is 100 times more important to Google [than the cookie deprecation investigations] … Google views AI in a very existential way — they believe that if they don’t get ahead of it their business could collapse in five to ten years,” Bannister said.
Meanwhile U.S. legislators have removed a major barrier to state-level AI laws. Last week, the U.S. Senate voted to remove a 10-year federal ban (effectively a proposed moratorium) on state regulation AI from President Trump’s Tax-Cut and Spending Bill.
This is a sign, according to some, that the use of AI by tech giants to repurpose content and profit from it is no longer a distant concern but a new battleground.
Danielle Coffey is the CEO of News Media Alliance which represents more than 2,000 publishers across the U.S. She released a statement expressing her hope that Congress will now take up additional legislation to regulate AI at a federal level. Coffey said that we are witnessing a pivotal moment in the way regulators around the world approach Big Tech. They are not only scrutinizing entrenched dominances in search and adtech, but also anticipating their extension into AI. She said that competition policy must keep pace with the shift or we run the risk of replicating this concentration and control. “Europe’s investigation signals that governments are beginning to connect the dots.”
Content scraping without authorization has been a major online pestilence. News Media Europe, a trade association representing more than 2,700 European publishers, has urged the European Commission to intervene using both competition enforcement and the Digital Markets Act to stop Google AI Overviews. Iacob Gambmeltoft is the senior policy manager at News Media Europe. He said that this was an urgent matter that needed attention before it was too late.
According to Gammeltoft, the DMA can be used as a tool to impose interim actions pending the result of a market inquiry. It also has specific provisions which prohibit self-preferencing and require that conditions of access to search engines of digital gatekeepers like Google are fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory.
According to Gammeltoft, “What is at stake with AI Overviews is an entirely different order of importance. It’s the business models of publishing itself.” “Since this product keeps users away from publishers’ property, they cannot run ads and users have no incentive to subscribe. The value chain collapses, and Google continues to ignore copyright laws, simply because it can.
Sajeeda Meali, CEO of Professional Publishers Association said that publishers are embracing AI’s transformative potential but that this can’t come at the expense robust copyright legislation that supports responsible, transparent AI usage and protects publishers and creators.
She said that “Regulators worldwide need to stand up against Big Tech and act quickly to strengthen crucial competition, intellectual property laws, and copyright legislation to safeguard the future” of a sector which employs 55,000 people in the U.K. and is worth PS4.4 billion (19459017) to the economy.
