Rolling Stone owner accuses Google of monopolising news with AI overviews

Google has been hit with a lawsuit from Penske Media Corporation (PMC), which accuses the tech giant of illegally using news publishers’ content to generate AI summaries that harm their business, according to TechCrunch.

PMC, which owns publications including Rolling Stone, Billboard, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, Vibe, and Artforum, is the first to sue Google and its parent company, Alphabet, over AI-generated summaries in search results. Other publishers and authors have filed lawsuits against different AI companies over similar copyright concerns.

The complaint also adds to Google’s mounting legal challenges. In Europe, the company is facing an antitrust complaint over its AI Overviews feature, which was launched last year. Since its rollout, the tool has drawn criticism for threatening the business models of publishers that supply the very content used to build summaries and answers.

In its filing, the media house alleged that Google "wields its monopoly to coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC’s content in AI Overviews" and uses that content to train its AI models. The lawsuit further claims that PMC has experienced 'significant declines in clicks from Google searches since Google started rolling out AI Overviews,' threatening advertising, subscription, and affiliate revenues.

According to the reports, the media house argued that Google had upended the longstanding exchange in which publishers allow the company to crawl their websites in return for traffic. The suit claims that Google now ties this bargain to additional uses of content that “cannibalise or preempt search referrals,” with opting out meaning complete removal from Google search, something PMC described as 'devastating.'

PMC CEO Jay Penske was quoted in the report as saying that the company has a duty to protect its journalists and a responsibility toward safeguarding digital media and its integrity, which he argued are under threat from Google’s actions.

The company, however, dismissed the allegations. Company spokesperson José Castañeda said AI Overviews make search 'more helpful' and provide 'new opportunities for content to be discovered'. He added that the company 'sends billions of clicks to sites across the web' and that AI Overviews direct traffic to a greater diversity of sites. Castañeda stated that the company would 'defend against these meritless claims.'

The lawsuit follows a recent ruling in the United States in which a federal judge found the company acted illegally to maintain its search monopoly but stopped short of ordering structural remedies, partly due to growing competition in AI.