A US judge has said he's sympathetic to publishers who are losing money because of Google's AI summaries stealing content, but he's not going to do anything to stop it.
Google recently escaped having its search and advertising business split over antitrust accusations from the Department of Justice. But it has been facing multiple other antitrust cases and now there's one fewer.
According to Reuters, Google's parent company Alphabet had convinced a US federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit. It had been brought by Penske Media Corp, best known for publishing Rolling Stone magazine, and Chegg.
They claimed that Google was unlawfully using content from their sites in its AI summaries. So instead of users clicking through to these publishers' sites, they are staying on Google's pages.
This meant, said the publishers, that they lost revenue because of reduced traffic to their sites. More, they claimed that they were forced to allow this if they wanted to continue being included in search results. All this is true, and verifiable.
The judge in charge disagrees that it matters, legally.
US District Judge Amit Mehta concluded that he is not "unsympathetic" to the situation. However, he said that addressing economic harm is an issue for legislators, not antitrust suits.
"Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," Mehta wrote in his ruling. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."
Judge Mehta said that consequently, the publishers' suit, "fail[s] to get out of the starting gate."
There's no question that Google's AI summaries has cut down the number of users who click through to sites publishing original material. Google admits to that.
Google also admits that those summaries and other AI answers are very often wrong.
Separately, Google has had deals involving paying publishers such as News Corp for content, but they do not include AI use. There is a newer deal paying a small amount of creators for substantive use of their content in AI summaries, but payouts for those are minuscule.
