Alphabet-owned Google (GOOGL) is facing an EU antitrust complaint over its AI Overviews service from a group of independent publishers.
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According to a document seen by Reuters, the publishers have also asked for an interim measure to prevent allegedly irreparable harm being done to their business.
Market Power
Google’s AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear above traditional hyperlinks to relevant webpages and are shown to users in more than 100 countries. It began adding advertisements to AI Overviews last May.
However, the Independent Publishers Alliance document has set out a complaint to the European Commission alleging that Google is abusing its market power in online search.
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” the document said.
Second Complaint
It adds that Google positions its AI Overviews at the top of its general search engine results page to display its own summaries which are generated using publisher material and it alleges that Google’s positioning disadvantages publishers’ original content.
“New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” a Google spokesperson said.
The complaints follow a U.S. lawsuit by U.S. edtech company Chegg (CHGG) which said Google’s AI Overviews are eroding demand for original content and undermining publishers’ ability to compete, which has resulted in a drop in visitors and subscribers.
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