US competition lawsuit: Learning platform criticizes Google's AI Overviews

An online learning platform from California is suing Google. Chegg is focusing on the AI Overviews. This is the area that Google initially only displays above the actual search results in the USA, an AI-generated summary of a search. As is usually the case with AI-generated content, these can contain errors. Chegg criticizes this. This is because people searching for help may receive incorrect information. However, Chegg is even more critical of the fact that they are missing out on subscribers and clicks since the AI summaries have been available – while Google is profiting from the content.

Google is undermining the demand for original content on the one hand and the opportunity for publishers to compete with the generated summaries on the other, he says. Chegg also fears that it will damage the entire information ecosystem that the answers are unreliable. Meanwhile, US users are complaining that they don't even want to see the AI Overviews.

Google uses all content for the AI Overviews

To offer the AI Overviews, Google uses information from various websites and what the AI, in Google's case its own called Gemini, has been trained with. As a rule, this is also everything that is freely available on the Internet. Before generative AI was widely available, the situation was as follows: Google displayed suitable websites in the search results, and searchers had to go to their site to find out more. This click usually brought the website operators money because they could display advertising.

The fact that Google itself is responsible for the advertising market on a large scale has always been a cause for concern. In addition, there have always been discussions about ancillary copyright and whether Google can use content for searches without paying the content creators. The latter generally deny this, with Google arguing that they bring people to the sites in the first place, i.e., they generate traffic and therefore advertising revenue.

This discussion is now going one step further with generative AI. This is because content creators often lack the clicks if Google itself already offers detailed explanations of the questions in the AI overviews. The procedure becomes even more questionable when content from websites is used for the overviews. Website operators can therefore decide not to make their content available.

Allegation: violation of competition law

However, according to Reuters, the plaintiff says that Google is forcing publishers and content creators to make their content available. They can only choose not to appear on Google at all or to be available for AI Overviews. This is a violation of competition law. It stated that it was forbidden to make the “sale of a product dependent on the customer selling or giving another product to its supplier”.

In addition to the lawsuit filed by the learning platform, another lawsuit has been filed against Google and AI Overviews by a newspaper from Arkansas. It is a class action lawsuit, reports Reuters, which is being handled by the judge who also ruled that Google has an illegal monopoly in online search.

Meanwhile, people from the USA are increasingly complaining that they don't want AI Overviews anyway. The content is repeatedly criticized – from noodles cooked in petrol to an imaginary airplane train in Japan, much of it is simply nonsense. Google itself has unceremoniously introduced a search function that allows you to search only text-based content from the web. To find it, you have to go to the Google homepage and select “more” options.

To permanently get rid of Google's AI answers, the blog Tedium suggests adding the parameter “udm=14" to the Google URL. This would also get you into the web search.

(emw)