Reuters reported that Alphabet’s Google was under new regulatory scrutiny by the European Union following a formal complaint filed against it by a group independent publishers.
They claim that AI generated search summaries from the company are damaging their business.
In a document of complaint dated 30 June, the group also asked the European Commission for interim measures in order to avoid what it called a severe blow to the competition and the access to independent journalists.
Two additional groups have also endorsed the complaint: Movement for an Open Web, a coalition consisting of digital publishers and advertisers; and Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company in the UK which promotes tech accountability.
Google faces new problems in the EU
Google AI Overviews, the AI-generated answers that are displayed above the traditional search results, is at the heart of the complaints.
These summaries, which are now available in more than 100 countries, aim to give users direct answers to their queries without the need to visit external websites.
Google started including ads in these overviews as of May.
Independent Publishers Alliance is the group that filed the complaint. They claim these AI Overviews use publisher content without their consent to create summaries, which diverts users away from original sources.
The complaint said that Google’s search engine core service misused web content to create Google AI Overviews, which caused and continues to cause significant harm to news publishers. This includes traffic loss, readers’ drop, and revenue losses.
This group also claims that Google’s placement of AI summaries on top of the search results favors their own content over original publishers’ work.
The complaint states that publishers cannot opt out from having their content be used to train AI models or to generate summaries, without being also excluded from Google’s search results. This scenario is deemed by the Alliance to constitute an abuse of Google’s market dominance.
The group claimed that “publishers who use Google Search don’t have an option to refuse to allow their content to be ingested by Google for its AI large language models training or to crawl for summaries without losing the ability to appear on Google’s search results pages.”
Google replies to complaints
Google responded by defending its practices and highlighting the value Search brings to the entire digital ecosystem.
Google’s spokesperson said that the new AI-powered Search experiences allow users to ask more questions. This creates opportunities to discover content and business.
It also added that the company sends out billions of website clicks each day.
Google took issue with critics who claim AI Overviews divert traffic. Google called their data incomplete.
The spokesperson for the news agency said that “sites can lose or gain traffic due to a number of factors, such as seasonal demand, user interests, and frequent algorithmic changes in Search”.
The report Google faces EU Antitrust Complaint over AI Overviews may change as new developments unfold.
