Because of AI summaries: US publishing house files lawsuit against Google
Online media have been complaining that Google's AI summaries are causing clicks and advertising revenue to plummet. Now a US publisher is going to court.
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The publishing house behind world-famous US media magazines such as Rolling Stone, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter has filed a lawsuit in Washington D.C. against Google over AI summaries. Penske Media alleges that the search engine company is abusing its monopoly position to force online media to provide content that Google republishes in AI-edited form without permission in order to compete with the publishers' content. As a result, far fewer people would come to the sites themselves, which would have a noticeable impact on sales and the company's own business.
In the statement of claim, the US media company cites the long-standing agreement between search engines such as Google and publishers, which has become the basis of the free internet. Media such as those from Penske allow Google & Co. to search their pages and index what they find in the search results. In return, the visits generated for Rolling Stone, Variety & Co. have made it possible to produce commercial content for the internet on a large scale. Recently, however, Google has tied its part of the business to a further condition, demanding that publishers also make their content available for other purposes, which competes directly with the content, cannibalizes visits or prevents them altogether.
Google's approach "fundamentally harmful" for the open internet
– Because the – AI summaries generated only with the help of publishers' content often answer the questions asked by searchers and at the same time are displayed much more prominently in Google searches, fewer visitors come directly to those pages without which they would not be possible at all. "Google's foray into online publishing" is structured in such a way that Google becomes the destination and no longer an intermediate stage on the way to other websites, according to the statement of claim. This is only possible because Google has a monopoly in Internet search. This is the only reason why the company can force publishers to make their content available for AI training.
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Tapping visits to Penske and other media websites "will have a fundamentally damaging impact on the overall quality and quantity of information available on the internet", according to the accusation. If Google is allowed to continue to train AI with publishers' content and use the results to reduce the number of visits to original sites, "the economic incentives to create and publish high-quality original content will evaporate", Penske predicts. Google has contradicted this and assured the Wall Street Journal that those who click on links to the sources despite AI summaries stay there longer. Users find web searches with AI summaries more helpful and use them more.
(mho)
