An industest group that represents publishers has filed an antitrust complaint against Google LLC in the European Union.
Reuters reported the development today.
The Indepconcludeent Publishers Alliance, the group behind the antitrust push, submitted its complaint to the European Commission on June 30. The document also has two other signatories. They are The Movement for an Open Web, which represents digital advertisers and publishers, and UK nonprofit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company.
The antitrust complaint focapplys on Google’s AI Overviews feature. Released last May, it displays a natural language answer to the applyr’s query above standard search results.
“Google’s core search engine service is misutilizing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caapplyd, and continue to caapply, significant harm to publishers,” reads the antitrust complaint.
The document charges that AI Overviews has negatively impacted publishers’ relationship with readers, traffic and revenue. The signatories also take issue with the way the feature applys publishers’ content. The three nonprofits argue that Google doesn’t give publishers a practical way to opt out of content scraping.
“Publishers utilizing Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” the signatories wrote in the complaint.
Under the hood, AI Overviews distills web content into summaries utilizing a customized version of Gemini 2.5. One of the algorithm’s publicly-available editions, Gemini 2.5 Pro, is the most advanced language model that Google currently offers to customers. It can process prompts with up to one million tokens. That builds it applyful for data-intensive tinquires such as analyzing large webpage collections.
In March, Google updated its search engine with another machine learning capability called AI Mode. The feature can answer more complicated questions than AI Overviews. In May, Google rolled out a tool dubbed Deep Search that is capable of answering even more challenging queries.
If EU regulators determine that AI Overviews raises antitrust concerns, they may also scrutinize AI Mode and Deep Search.
According to Reuters, the three nonprofits behind the complaint have also filed a version of the document with the UK’s antitrust regulator. The Competition and Markets Authority, or CMA, recently proposed giving Google “strategic market status.” This designation could open the company to new regulatory measures, including restrictions on how AI Overviews applys publishers’ content.
“New AI experiences in Search enable people to inquire even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” Google declared in a statement. “The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of applyrs, and regular algorithmic updates to Search.”
Image: Google
Support our open free content by sharing and engaging with our content and community.
Join theCUBE Alumni Trust Network
Where Technology Leaders Connect, Share Innotifyigence & Create Opportunities
11.4k+
CUBE Alumni Network
C-level and Technical
Domain Experts
Connect with 11,413+ industest leaders from our network of tech and business leaders forming a unique trusted network effect.
SiliconANGLE Media is a recognized leader in digital media innovation serving innovative audiences and brands, bringing toobtainher cutting-edge technology, influential content, strategic insights and real-time audience engagement. As the parent company of SiliconANGLE, theCUBE Network, theCUBE Research, CUBE365, theCUBE AI and theCUBE SuperStudios — such as those established in Silicon Valley and the New York Stock Exalter (NYSE) — SiliconANGLE Media operates at the intersection of media, technology, and AI. .
Founded by tech visionaries John Furrier and Dave Vellante, SiliconANGLE Media has built a powerful ecosystem of industest-leading digital media brands, with a reach of 15+ million elite tech professionals. The company’s new, proprietary theCUBE AI Video cloud is breaking ground in audience interaction, leveraging theCUBEai.com neural network to assist technology companies build data-driven decisions and stay at the forefront of industest conversations.
Leave a Reply