Google-parent company Alphabet has secured the dismissal of antitrust lawsuits filed by education technology platform Chegg and entertainment publisher Penske Media Corp, which alleged that the search engine unlawfully repurposed their copyrighted content into AI-generated search summaries that diverted readers away from their websites. According to a report by news agency Reuters, an order issued by US District Judge Amit Mehta of the District of Columbia dismissed both complaints, concluding that the publishers’ claims that Google violated federal antitrust statutes “fail to get out of the starting gate.”
What Chegg and Penske claimed in their lawsuits
Chegg and Penske Media, the parent company behind publications such as Rolling Stone, Variety and Billboard, brought the lawsuits last year, claiming Google engaged in anticompetitive conduct by tying search visibility to AI summaries. The plaintiffs argued that Google effectively forced publishers to permit their digital content to be summarised by AI Overviews if they wished to stay indexed in Google Search.They also claimed Google scraped and synthesised their web pages directly on results pages sharply reduced referral traffic, eroding their advertising and subscription revenue. In a truly competitive search market, Google would be compelled to license their material or pay to train its AI systems.Google denied any wrongdoing, countering that it is under no legal mandate to index external web pages under publishers’ self-selected terms.
What the ruling said
Judge Mehta rejected the claims that the search engine owed publishers guaranteed web traffic in return for crawling publicly accessible pages.“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. “But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.”While Mehta noted he was not “unsympathetic to the situation of publishers and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation,” he held that antitrust statutes cannot serve as a stand-in for congressional action to remedy the economic fallout of technological innovation.