On Tuesday, an EU antitrust complaint of Google was filed by the European Publishers Council, alleging that the company has created AI-generated summaries called AI Overviews. The complaint is against the basic search engine product of Alphabet and how it uses publisher content to come up with answers on the results page without fair compensation, without authorization and without a realistic means to respond on their part.
It is not some little complaint of some few, frustrated editors. The EPC is one of the biggest news companies in Europe. Their chairman Christian Van Thillo put the stakes clear, when he stated that Google is behaving as a powerful gatekeeper, leveraging its position of market dominance to steal publishers their content and provide it as its own AI-generated work.
The accusation may further strengthen an ongoing EU investigation which has been accruing since December 2024, when the European Commission officially announced that it was investigating whether Google was using its dominance in search to disadvantage publishers by offering unfair trading terms.
AI Overviews and AI Mode Threaten the Economics of Digital Publishing
The root of the problem in this case is very simple. Over the last two decades, publishers generated content. Google indexed it. It was clicked through to be read. Publishers made money off of that traffic. Everyone benefited.
It is AI Overviews which alter that equation. It frequently happens that when Google creates the summary that appears at the top of the page of the search results, the user is no longer required to navigate to the source of the information, as well as he/she already has it. The reporting, the fact checking and the editing were done by the publisher. That work was fed by the AIs of Google and provided the user with a well-packaged paragraph, but the publisher received nothing.
Van Thillo termed it as a framework that is intrinsically dismantling the economic deal that has made the open web possible. The point of care of that language is that this is not a dispute between the players, but the threat of structural damage to the whole ecosystem of independent journalism and digital publishing.
The more conversational AI search experience by Google, which is called AI Mode, only exacerbates the same concern. The more competent such AI capabilities are to compile publisher content by synthesizing them into direct responses, the less it makes sense to go to the websites that produce that content in the first place.
Google Says It Designs AI Features to Surface Great Content
Google responded to the complaint by bringing out a very forthright statement: such allegations are false, and they are an effort to suppress beneficial AI capabilities that Europeans are seeking.
The official representative of Google stressed that its AI solutions are designed to bring the best content to the surface of the web and also give publishers convenient controls to control how it will appear. Google also reported that it is considering its technical controls to allow sites to exclude Search generative AI features.
Such reaction should be given a good chance. Google has put billions of dollars in AI research. AI Overviews are useful to users. And the company does offer some means of publishers to regulate their involvement.
However, the publisher side makes a strong counterargument that goes down to the core of the argument.
Opting Out of AI Overviews Means Losing Search Visibility
It is at this point that the power imbalance cannot be overlooked. In Europe, Google has a monopoly of about 90 percent of the search market. When a publisher decides to avoid AI Overviews in order to preserve its material, it may be in danger of being completely lost in the search. That is not an actual decision but a fake one.
Google search traffic is the lifeline of publishers as foot traffic is with a storefront in town. The act of informing them that they have the option to not use AI-generated summaries and realizing the act of not doing that will tank their discoverability is not providing a meaningful control. It is presenting a form of punishment in the form of a preference.
This dynamic was realized by the European Commission when it initiated its investigations in December. The initial issue was clear: Google can be misusing its market place power as an engine to unfair trading terms to the publishers. The EPC complaint supports that with some new evidence and an official legal complaint.
What Happens Next Could Reshape How Big Tech Uses Publisher Content
This grievance comes at a time when regulators all over the world are considering the way large technology firms engage in the media industry. The Digital Markets Act of the EU already defines Google as a gatekeeper that has certain obligations. That, on top of an antitrust finding, might necessitate structural changes to how AI Overviews are run - perhaps by licensing the work, a revenue-sharing structure, or some form of real opt-out that does not punish publishers who are safeguarding their own work.
The performance of Europe is irrelevant in a greater way. Any precedent established by the EU will have an implication on the policy arguments in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and all other markets where publishers are increasingly watching their traffic being eaten up as artificial intelligence sites gain popularity.
This is not an anti-technology and anti-AI. Artificial intelligence search could actually enhance the experience. However, innovation does not necessarily need to be at the cost of the individuals that create the contents that render these functions worthwhile. Whether the companies that construct the AI tools will compensate fairly the raw material they rely on, or will they continue getting it free will remain open to question until the regulators compel them to stop.
The EU has made a single step toward providing the answer to this question.
