European publishers take action against Google's AI Overviews

The European Publishers Council, the association of European publishers, is fighting back against Google. To this end, they have filed a formal complaint with the European Commission. The issue concerns the AI overviews in search and the AI Mode. Both, according to the allegations, violate European competition law in their current form and threaten the open web.

As is well known, this is not the first complaint against AI overviews and AI chatbots that use content from publishers and other providers to generate AI answers. There are lawsuits both in the EU and in the USA. This new formal complaint from the publishers' association now joins an ongoing investigation by the EU Commission. The focus is on whether Google is abusing its dominant market position to harm others.

No compensation, no content; no content, no AI

In the statement from the publishers, it is stated that Google has rebuilt its search from a forwarding service into an answer engine – “which replaces the original publisher content and keeps users within Google's own ecosystem.” Google relies on the high-quality content of publishers, both for the answers and for training the AI models. However, there is no payment or other compensation for the use of the content.

The Chairman of the Council, Christian Van Thillo, writes that it is not about slowing down innovation or AI. “It is about preventing a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take over content from publishers without their consent, without fair compensation, and without giving publishers a realistic opportunity to protect their journalism. AI overviews and AI mode fundamentally undermine the economic pact that has sustained the open web so far.”

The resulting damage is irreversible. Once readers and reader loyalty are lost, and trust is broken, it cannot be rebuilt with money.

The lawsuit also states that drying up information sources will ultimately affect AI services as well. These rely on the content. Unlike OpenAI and Perplexity, for example, Google has not yet entered into partnerships with publishers or concluded license agreements for content. While this system of very selective cooperation, from which only a few benefit, is also lagging, Google's approach is apparently significantly worse, according to the Council. This includes, for example, Google linking the appearance in regular search to making the content freely available for all AI applications. This is also part of the formal complaint that the EU Commission itself has initiated.

The accusation that Google violates EU copyright law – including related rights – is viewed differently. This refers, for example, to the ancillary copyright, which protects not only the author or the work but also producers or stakeholders, such as companies and publishers responsible for the distribution of content. It specifically stipulates that platforms like Google must pay when they display excerpts from newspaper articles. The problem is that it is not always possible to prove where, for example, information in an AI chatbot's answer originates.

The publishers' association finally demands that a new remuneration system must be developed.

(emw)