On behalf of news publishers, a new class action complaint filed this week in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia accuses Google and parent firm Alphabet of anticompetitive activity in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others. A publisher from Arkansas named Helena World Chronicle filed the lawsuit, alleging that Google engages in anticompetitive behavior to “siphon off” the content, readers, and ad revenue of news publishers. It also particularly mentions emerging AI technologies such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and the Bard AI chatbot as aggravating the situation.
The Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, claims in its case that Google is “starving the free press” by sharing publishers’ material on Google, costing them “billions of dollars.”
The action claims that, in addition to new AI technologies, Google’s earlier question-and-answer technologies, such as the “Knowledge Graph” introduced in May 2012, are part of the issue. 
“When a user searches for information on a particular topic, Google displays a ‘Knowledge Panel’ to the right of the search results.” The lawsuit alleges that “this panel contains a summary of content drawn from the Knowledge Graph database.” “Google compiled this massive database by extracting information from publishers’ websites—what Google calls ‘materials shared across the’web”—and from ‘open source and licensed databases,'” according to the report.
The Knowledge Graph contained 500 billion pieces of information concerning 5 billion entities by 2020. However, most of the “collective intelligence” that Google accessed was material “misappropriated from publishers,” according to the lawsuit.
Other Google technologies, such as “Featured Snippets,” which Google uses to extract answers from webpages, have also been noted as diverting traffic away from publishers’ websites.
Perhaps more crucially, the complaint addresses how AI will affect the businesses of publishers. The Wall Street Journal recently revealed the issue in an article on Thursday, which began with a surprising number. When The Atlantic simulated what would happen if Google incorporated AI into search, it discovered that 75% of the time, the AI would answer the user’s question without necessitating a click-through to its website, costing it traffic. This might have a significant influence on publisher traffic in the future, since Google now generates approximately 40% of their traffic, according to SimilarWeb statistics.
Some publishers are already attempting to anticipate the issue. Axel Springer, for example, has signed a contract with OpenAI to license its news for AI model training. However, according to The Wall Street Journal, publishers expect to lose 20–40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products go live.
The complaint reiterates this worry, alleging that Google’s recent breakthroughs in AI-based search were deployed with “the goal of discouraging end-users from visiting the websites of Class Members who are part of the digital news and publishing line of commerce.”
It claims that SGE allows online searchers to seek information in a conversational fashion, but that it ultimately keeps people in Google’s “walled garden” by “plagiarizing” their material. Publishers cannot also prevent SGE from functioning since it employs the same web crawler as Google’s general search engine, GoogleBot.
Furthermore, it claims that Google’s Bard AI was trained on a dataset comprised of “news, magazines, and digital publications,” citing a 2023 study from the News Media Alliance as well as a Washington Post piece regarding AI training data as sources. (The Post discovered, in collaboration with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI, that news and media sites constituted the third biggest category of AI training data.)
Other problems cited in the case include fluctuating AdSense prices and evidence of inappropriate spoliation of evidence on Google’s side, as seen by the loss of chat conversations—an issue addressed in Epic Games’ recent lawsuit against Google over app store antitrust issues, which Epic won.
In addition to monetary penalties, the action seeks an order requiring Google to gain permission from publishers before using their website data to train generic artificial intelligence products, including Google’s and competitors’. It also requests that Google enable publications that choose not to participate in SGE to still appear in Google search results, among other things.
The action in the United States follows a deal Google negotiated with the Canadian government last month under which the search engine would pay Canadian media for the usage of their material. Under the terms of the agreement, Google will contribute $73.5 million (100 million Canadian dollars) to news organizations in the nation each year, with cash disbursed depending on headcount. Negotiations with Meta are still ongoing, while Meta started blocking news in Canada in August in response to the new Canadian law’s requirement that material be paid for.
The case also comes on the heels of the United States Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google for monopolizing digital ad technologies, and it refers to the Justice Department’s civil antitrust suit over search and search advertising (which are different markets than digital ad technologies in the more recent suit).
“The anticompetitive effects of Google’s scheme cause profound harm to competition, consumers, labor, and a democratic free press,” according to a statement on the website of the legal company managing the case, Hausfeld.
“Plaintiff Helena World Chronicle, LLC, invokes the Sherman Act and Clayton Act to seek class-wide monetary and injunctive relief to restore and ensure competition for digital news and reference publishing and set up guardrails to preserve a free marketplace of ideas in the new era of artificial intelligence,” according to the complaint.
Google has been contacted for comment, but none has been offered.
The complaint may be seen below.
