A looming cloud of antitrust allegations hang over the renowned tech company, Google. Their novel AI-generated summaries are under investigation following a complaint lodged by the Independent Publishers Alliance with the European Commission. These claims indicate an alleged misuse of web content by Google’s AI overviews, contributing to significant harm to publishers. Specifically, news publishers are facing substantial losses in terms of traffic, readership, and revenue.
The contention primarily lies in the reported absence of an opt-out option for publishers. This holds unless they are ready to completely disappear from Google search results, essentially a Catch-22 situation. Google had introduced the AI-generated summaries feature a little over a year ago. Despite initial hiccups and off-kilter responses, the function has expanded significantly. This expansion, however, is reportedly causing a decline in traffic for news publishers.