The European Publishers Council (EPC), a trade group which counts News UK, Axel Springer, The Guardian, Grupo Prisa, Bauer Media and Condé Nast among its members, has filed a complaint with the European Commission accusing Google of abusing its dominant position in the search engine market through its deployment of AI tools in the Google Search interface.
The complaint follows along the same lines as the gripes which numerous publishing groups have aired both publicly and in private since Google started integrating AI features into Google Search. The EPC alleges that Google’s AI tools, namely its AI Overviews feature (which creates an AI-generated response to a user query, which sits above regular search results) and AI Mode (which functions as a separate chatbot, available within the wider search interface) use publishers’ content without true authorisation. Google, according to the complaint, doesn’t provide publishers with an effective opt-out mechanism, nor fair remuneration, while the presence of these AI tools siphons traffic away from those same publishers, and hinders the creation of a fair licensing market.
“This complaint is not about resisting innovation or artificial intelligence,” said Christian Van Thillo, chairman of the EPC. “It is about stopping a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take publishers’ content without consent, without fair compensation, and without giving publishers any realistic way to protect their journalism. AI Overviews and AI Mode fundamentally undermine the economic compact that has sustained the open web.”
Without action, the trade group says that small, regional, and specialist publishers will be forced to exit the market. Over time, the EPC says that the “erosion of the economic base of journalism” will degrade the quality and reliability of AI tools themselves, as they’ll have fewer reliable sources to draw data and information from. The complaint calls on the European Commission to take action to give publishers meaningful control of their content, and to foster the creation of a fair licensing and remuneration framework for AI use of publisher content.
Google and publishers clash over AI use
Google has long pushed back on the notion that its AI tools harm publishers. In a statement provided to Reuters, it described the EPC’s claims as “inaccurate”, and an attempt to “hold back helpful new AI features that Europeans want”.
The tech giant disputes claims made by numerous publishers and various third-party studies that its AI tools harm publisher traffic. A blog post published last August, for example, claimed that total organic click volume from Google Search to websites had been stable for the previous year, and that average click quality had increased. While this isn’t a sentiment you’ll hear echoed by many publishers, some say that not all search terms are equally affected, and that clickthrough rates for some types of stories haven’t been hit too hard.
Another key part of the debate is whether Google lets publishers opt-out of their data being used in its AI tools. Any publisher can choose to block Google from using their content in its AI Overviews, but to do so, they have to opt-out of Google Search entirely. For publishers who depend on Google as a traffic source, this isn’t really a viable strategy. Google’s market power lets it impose unfair conditions on publishers, according to the EPC. The trade group says this is why Google hasn’t entered into AI licensing deals with publishers while several other platforms have: it simply doesn’t need to.
Google has suggested it would be willing to negotiate terms with publishers — in some cases. Speaking to a House of Lords Committee earlier this year, Google’s IP lead Roxanne Carter drew a distinction between AI tools which regurgitate content, and those which simply use content for training purposes. For the former, it’s fair to expect payment, according to Carter. For the latter, not so much. “If you’re asking us to pay for every single piece of content for the training of the model, and if that content is freely available on the web, then no [AI companies shouldn’t be expected to pay],” she said.
This isn’t necessarily such a clear distinction from a publisher’s point of view, though. Publishers have reported particular drops in traffic for explainer articles and service journalism. In these cases, AI tools don’t necessarily cite content from one particular source. But when AI tools are trained on these sorts of articles, and are able to answer user queries on those topics, they can still draw traffic away from the publishers whose content was used in training.
The EPC’s argument about Google hindering the development of a fair licensing market is an interesting one. As the group points out, it’s in the interests of tech companies to protect the future of the publishing industry — without it, they’ll run out of quality sources to train on. One point made by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince last year was that while individual AI tools and companies understand this, they operate in a competitive market, and won’t want to pay publishers themselves while others get a free ride. To be fair, we are seeing attempts to figure out models for publisher payment. But so long as Google gets access to publishers’ journalism for free, it may make negotiations elsewhere more difficult.
While the debate rages on, we’re seeing signs of regulators and governments siding with publishers. The European Commission has already announced an investigation into possible anticompetitive conduct by Google in how it runs its AI products. Meanwhile the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority earlier this year proposed imposing measures on Google forcing it to allow publishers to opt out of having their content uses within its AI products.
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