Google may have a monopoly in search, but neither lawsuit made a compelling case the company was leveraging it.
A federal judge has dismissed lawsuits from publisher Penske Media Corporation (PMC) and ed tech company Chegg that alleged Google’s AI Overviews illegally pulled readers away by repackaging their online content, Reuters reports. In a memorandum opinion on both lawsuits, Judge Amit Mehta, coincidentally the same judge who ruled that Google maintained a monopoly in online search services in 2024, said the companies failed to argue the search provider violated antitrust laws.
PMC and Chegg’s original lawsuits claimed that Google was using AI Overviews and its vast index of the web to siphon traffic away from their online ad businesses, hurting their revenue. Chegg additionally said that Google was effectively forcing websites to offer their content up for AI scraping or face being excluded from search results.
Judge Mehta dismissed both claims for a variety of reasons, but broadly found that neither company convincingly argued that Google was leveraging its monopoly to get them to provide free material for its AI, or that the search provider was trying to gain an unfair advantage in digital publishing. “Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an ‘expectation’ that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free,” Mehta wrote. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”
Engadget has asked PMC and Chegg to comment on the memorandum opinion. We’ll update this article if we hear back.
Other publishers have raised concerns about how their content contributes to Google’s AI search features, but the situation isn’t entirely clear-cut. Publishers can exclude webpages from being used for AI Overviews, but they will still be listed in traditional search results. With more and more of the search results page taken up by AI Mode and AI Overviews, though, it’s easy to see why that might not be a satisfying compromise.
Credit: Source link
