NEW CASE: Foxglove launches international legal challenge to Google’s worldwide theft of news!
This week, Foxglove sent legal letters to the competition regulators of the UK and the European Union calling for an urgent intervention to prevent Google stealing the work of professional journalists – and regurgitating it into error-strewn AI-generated summaries that rip off the reporters who did all the actual work.
Our partners in this case are the Independent Publishers Alliance and the Movement for an Open Web (MOW), and it is supported by leading antitrust law firm Preiskel and Co.
Nowadays, when someone searches for something on Google, instead of fetching the best results and sorting them into the familiar list of blue links, Google will often provide an autogenerated AI overview (AIO) instead.
These AIO are generated by Google’s Large Language Model (LLM) AI Gemini by scraping information from the very blue links that a user would previously have been served in response to their search. In news-related searches, AIOs are based on reporting scraped from news pages written by human journalists.
Crucially, the links to the news articles Gemini uses to create AIO are pushed down “below the fold” on the search results page meaning that, in many cases, they won’t be clicked through to at all.
In simple terms: Google is stealing the work of professional reporters – and making it worse – without compensating them, nor their publishers. One of the richest and most powerful companies in the world, which has a 90% monopoly on the global search market, is taking the money out of the pockets of journalists that they need to survive.
So much for “Don’t be evil”.
Our complaints detail how Google is abusing its dominant position in search to take publishers’ content and use it to promote AIO. It’s a perverse situation where the work of real, human reporters is cannibalised by Google’s AI and used against them, paradoxically making it much less likely that the original reporting will be clicked through to.
Crucially, publishers are given no realistic opportunity to opt out of AIOs without opting out of search altogether. As Google controls around 90% of search requests, the result of this would be to become effectively invisible online, a devastating blow for a news organisation that probably means going out of business.
That’s why we’re arguing that news publishers urgently need the ability to opt out of Google’s AI summaries but without being removed from search altogether. This is a measure that has already been proposed by other leading regulators, including the US Department of Justice and the South African Competition Commission.
Unless the UK and Europe take similar strong action, we risk being left behind.
For more news on this challenge as it happens, hit the button below: