Publishing lobby calls for government intervention over Google's AI Overviews
Photo: Department of Justice
The News/Media Alliance has written to antitrust divisions at the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission to demand a federal intervention against Google’s AI Overviews — the generative AI-powered summary boxes the search engine is now providing at the top of many results.
Publishers are deeply concerned that AI Overviews will greatly reduce the amount of traffic that will flow from search results to webpages, cutting off advertising and any other revenue.
From the letter:
Google’s misappropriation of publishers’ content and its undermining of publishers’ monetization opportunities are not competition on the merits. They are yet another example of Google restricting competition for its own benefit. Agency intervention is necessary to stop the existential threat Google poses to original content creators.