The parent company of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Variety filed a lawsuit against Google on Friday, accusing the tech giant's artificial intelligence (AI) summary of using its news content without permission and causing a decrease in traffic to its website.
The lawsuit, filed by Penske Media in federal court in Washington, D.C., marks the first time a major U.S. publisher has taken Google to court over existing AI-generated snippets at the top of Google search results.
For months, news organizations have said that new features such as Google’s “AI Overviews” would divert traffic to their websites, hurting advertising and subscription revenue.
The Penske Group is a family-owned media conglomerate led by Jay Penske whose content attracts 120 million monthly web visitors. The group said Google will only include publishers' websites in its search results if it can use their articles to generate AI summaries.
Penske Group said in the lawsuit that without this "advantageous position", Google should have paid publishers for the right to reprint their content or use the content to train its own AI systems. The group also pointed out that Google's ability to enforce such terms stems from its monopoly in the search field - a federal court investigation last year showed that the technology giant occupies nearly 90% of the search market share in the United States.
“We have a responsibility to proactively fight for the future of digital media and preserve its integrity — and Google’s current actions threaten all of that,” Penske said.
According to the lawsuit, about 20% of Google searches linking to Penske Group's websites currently display AI summaries, and this proportion is expected to rise; in addition, due to declining search traffic, by the end of 2024, the group's associated revenue has dropped by more than one-third from its peak.
In February this year, online education company Chegg also sued Google, accusing the search giant's AI-generated summaries of weakening user demand for original content and harming publishers' ability to compete.
In response to the Penske Group's lawsuit, Google said on Saturday that AI summarization provides users with a better experience and can drive traffic to more types of websites.
Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said: "With AI summarization, users find search features more useful and use them more frequently, which creates new opportunities for content to be discovered. We will defend these baseless accusations."
Earlier this month, a judge made a rare antitrust ruling in favor of Google: In order to promote competition in the search field, Google does not need to sell its Chrome browser.
The ruling disappointed some publishers and industry bodies, including the News/Media Alliance. The alliance said the ruling resulted in publishers being unable to opt out of AI summarization (i.e. unable to refuse Google’s use of their content to generate AI summaries).
Danielle Coffey, chief executive of the News/Media Alliance, an industry group representing more than 2,200 publishers in the United States, told Reuters on Friday: "The terms that we negotiate with every other AI company do not apply to Google because it has sufficient market power not to follow these reasonable practices."
"When a company has the scale and market power of Google, it doesn't have to abide by the same industry standards as other companies. That's the heart of the matter."
Coffey was referring to companies like ChatGPT developer OpenAI, which has signed AI licensing agreements with media outlets such as News Corp, the Financial Times and The Atlantic. Although Google's Gemini chatbot competes with ChatGPT, it has made slow progress in signing such agreements.