TechCrunch reports:
A group known as the Independent Publisher Alliance has filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission over Google’s AI Overviews, according to Reuters.
The complaint accuses Google of “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.”
It also says that unless they’re willing to disappear from Google search results entirely, publishers “do not have the option to opt out” of their material being used in AI summaries.
TechCrunch
It will be really interesting to see how this develops. Such a lawsuit has the potential to shape the future of online publishing as well as search. Google’s AI Overviews could be useful if they were as accurate and not prone to hallucinations as they have known to have been. However, as I have written about before, I share the plaintiff’s concern about the harm they could potentially cause online publishers.
