A new class action lawsuit was filed this week in U.S. District Court in D.C. accusing Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive conduct in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of news publishers. The case, brought by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, says Google is “misappropriating” news publishers’ content, readers and advertising revenue through anticompetitive means. It also specifically points to new AI technologies such as Google’s Generative Search Experience (SGE) and chatbot Bard AI, as exacerbating the problem.
In the complaint, the Helena World-Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, says Google is “starving the free press” by sharing publishers’ content on Google, losing them “billions of dollars.”
In addition to new AI technologies, the lawsuit 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 about a topic, Google displays the Knowledge Panel to the right of the search results. This panel contains a summary of content pulled from the Knowledge Graph database.” Google compiled this massive database by scraping information from publisher sites On the web — what Google calls “shared materials across the web” — and from “open source and licensed databases,” she says.
By 2020, it has become a knowledge graph Emerging To 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities. But much of the “collective intelligence” that Google exploited was content “siphoned from publishers,” the complaint alleges.
Other Google technologies, such as “featured snippets” where Google algorithmically extracts answers from web pages, have also been cited as diverting traffic away from publisher websites.
Perhaps more importantly, the lawsuit addresses how AI will impact publishers’ businesses. The issue was recently detailed In a report published by the Wall Street Journal on Thursday. Which results in a shocking statistic. When online magazine The Atlantic modeled what would happen if Google integrated AI into search, it found that in 75% of cases the AI answered a user’s query without them having to click through to their website, losing traffic. This could have a significant impact on publisher traffic in the future, as Google today attracts nearly 40% of their traffic, according to data from Sameweb.
Some publishers are now trying to get ahead of the problem. For example, this week Axel Springer signed a deal with OpenAI to license its news for training AI models. But overall, publishers believe they will lose between 20 and 40 percent of their website traffic when Google’s AI products are fully rolled out, the Wall Street Journal report noted.
The lawsuit reiterates this concern, alleging that Google’s recent advances in AI-based search were carried out “with the intent of discouraging end users from visiting the websites of class members who are part of the digital news and publishing business line of business.”
It claims that SGE offers web searchers a way to search for information in conversational mode, but ultimately keeps users in Google’s “walled garden” because it “steals” their content. Publishers also can’t 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 includes “digital news, magazines, and publications,” citing 2023 predictions. a report From the News Media Alliance and Washington Post article about AI training data for reference. (The Post, which worked with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI, found that news and media sites were the third largest category of AI training data.)
The case points to other concerns as well, such as changing AdSense prices and evidence of improper evidence theft on Google’s part, through the destruction of chat messages — an issue raised in Epic Games’ recent lawsuit against Google over App Store antitrust issues, which it won.
In addition to damages, the lawsuit seeks an injunction requiring Google to obtain publishers’ consent to use their website data to train its own public AI products, including Google’s own products and those of competitors. It also requires Google to allow publishers who opt out of SGE to continue to appear in Google search results, among other things.
The US lawsuit follows An agreement reached by Google last month with the Canadian government Which would see the search giant pay Canadian media outlets to use its content. Under the terms of the deal, Google will provide $73.5 million ($100 million CAD) each year to news organizations in the country, with the money distributed based on the number of media employees. Negotiations with Meta remain unresolved, although Meta began blocking news in Canada in August, in light of pressures to pay for content under a new Canadian law.
The case also comes alongside the US filing Department of Justice lawsuit against Google To monopolize digital advertising technologies, and refers to the 2020 Ministry of Justice decision Civil antitrust lawsuit on search and search advertising (which are different markets from the digital advertising techniques in the more recent lawsuit).
“The anticompetitive effects of Google’s scheme cause profound harm to competition, consumers, workers, and a free, democratic press.” advertisement It was 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 for monetary relief and class-wide injunctive relief to restore and ensure competition in the publication of digital news and references and to create guardrails to preserve a free market for ideas in the new age of technology. Artificial Intelligence,” As he says.
Google has been asked for comment, but no comment has yet been provided.
The complaint is available below.
Helena World Chronicle, LLC v. Google LLC and Alphabet Inc by TechCrunch On Scribd