A new class action lawsuit filed this week in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of news publishers, accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive practices that violate U.S. antitrust laws, the Sherman Act, and other laws. The lawsuit, filed by the Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, alleges that Google is “siphoning” content, readers and advertising revenue from news publishers through anticompetitive means. It also specifically cites new AI technologies such as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbots as exacerbating the problem.
The Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, said in its complaint that Google “starves freedom of the press” by sharing publishers’ content on Google and “starves out freedom of the press” and forces publishers to ” They claim that they have lost billions of dollars.
In addition to newer AI technology, the lawsuit also points to Google’s older question-and-answer technologies, such as Knowledge Graph, which was launched in May 2012, as part of the problem.
“When a user searches for information about a topic, Google displays a “knowledge panel” to the right of the search results. “This panel contains a summary of content extracted from the Knowledge Graph database,” the complaint states. “Google compiled this vast database by extracting information from publisher websites (what Google calls ‘material shared on the web’) and ‘open source and license databases.'” There is.
By 2020, the knowledge graph looked like this: grown 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities. However, much of the “collective intelligence” used by Google was content “appropriated from publishers,” the lawsuit alleges.
Other Google technologies, such as “Featured Snippets,” where Google algorithmically extracts answers from web pages, have also been cited as driving traffic away from publishers’ websites.
Perhaps more importantly, the case addresses how AI will impact publishers’ businesses.This issue has recently been clarified in detail In a Thursday report in the Wall St. Journal, It yielded shocking statistics. When the online magazine The Atlantic modeled what would happen if Google integrated AI into search, it found that 75% of the time, the AI would be used by users without requiring them to click through to his website. , and found that the traffic was lost. This could have a big impact on publisher traffic going forward, as Google currently accounts for nearly 40% of publisher traffic, according to SamelWeb data.
Some publishers are now trying to get ahead of this problem. For example, Axel Springer signed a deal with OpenAI this week to license AI model training news. But overall, publishers believe they will lose 20 to 40 percent of their website traffic once Google’s AI products are fully rolled out, the WSJ report said.
The lawsuit reiterates this concern, saying that Google’s recent advances in AI-based search are “for the purpose of discouraging end users from accessing class member websites that are part of the commercial field of digital news and publishing.” It is claimed that it was implemented in
SGE offers web searchers a conversational way to search for information, but it “appropriates” content, ultimately trapping users in Google’s “walled garden”. claims. Publishers also cannot block his SGE, as it uses his web crawler, which is the same as his GoogleBot, Google’s general search service.
Additionally, Google’s Bard AI says it was trained on a dataset that includes “news, magazines, and digital publications,” citing both 2023. report From News Media Alliance Washington Post article on AI training data For reference only. (The Post, working with researchers at the Allen Institute for AI, found that news and media sites were his third largest category of AI training data.)
The lawsuit also points to other concerns, including AdSense price changes and evidence of improper misappropriation of evidence on Google’s part through the destruction of chat messages. This issue is raised in the recent Epic Games lawsuit against Google over app store antitrust issues. I won.
In addition to damages, the lawsuit also seeks an injunction to obtain consent from publishers to use the website’s data to train artificial intelligence products in general, including those of Google itself and its competitors. It also calls on Google to allow publishers who opt out of SGE to continue to appear in Google search results.
Lawsuits continue in the US Google’s agreement with the Canadian government last month The search giant would then pay Canadian media a fee to use their content. Under the terms of the deal, Google will provide US$73.5 million (C$100 million) annually to news organizations in the country, with the funding to be distributed based on news organizations’ headcount. Negotiations with Meta have not yet been resolved, but Meta began blocking news in Canada in August in light of pressure to pay for content under new Canadian legislation.
This lawsuit will be filed at the same time as the U.S. lawsuit. Department of Justice files suit against Google against digital advertising technology monopolies, and the 2020 Department of Justice Civil antitrust lawsuit around search and search advertising (a different market than the digital advertising technology in recent litigation).
The anticompetitive effects of Google’s plans cause serious harm to competition, consumers, workers, and democratic press freedom.” announcement It was posted on the website of Hausfeld, the law firm that handled the case.
“Plaintiff Helena World Chronicle LLC invokes the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act to restore and ensure competition in digital news and reference publishing and install guardrails to preserve the free market of ideas in a new era. Seeks collective monetary and injunctive relief for: Artificial Intelligence.”
Google has been asked for comment, but has not yet received a response.
Complaints are available below.
Helena World Chronicle, LLC v. Google LLC and Alphabet Inc. by tech crunch On Scribd
