A recent class motion lawsuit filed this week within the U.S. District Court in D.C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of anticompetitive behavior in violation of U.S. antitrust law, the Sherman Act, and others, on behalf of reports publishers. The case, filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, argues that Google “siphons off” news publishers’ content, their readers and ad revenue through anticompetitive means. It also specifically cites recent AI technologies like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbot as worsening the issue.

Within the grievance, Helena World Chronicle, which owns and publishes two weekly newspapers in Arkansas, argues that Google is “ravenous the free press” by sharing publishers’ content on Google, losing them “billions of dollars.”

Along with recent AI technologies, the suit points to Google’s older question-and-answer technologies, just like the “Knowledge Graph” launched in May 2012, as a part of the issue.

“When a user searches for information on a subject, Google displays a ‘Knowledge Panel’ to the proper of the search results. This panel incorporates a summary of content drawn from the Knowledge Graph database,” the grievance states. “Google compiled this massive database by extracting information from Publishers’ web sites — what Google calls ‘materials shared across the net’ —and from ‘open source and licensed databases,’” it says.

By 2020, the Knowledge Graph had grown to 500 billion facts about 5 billion entities. But much of the “collective intelligence” that Google tapped into was content “misappropriated from Publishers,” the grievance alleges.

Other Google technologies, like “Featured Snippets” where Google algorithmically extracts answers from webpages, were also cited as shifting traffic away from publishers’ web sites.

More importantly, perhaps, is the suit’s tackling of how AI will impact publishers’ businesses. The issue was recently detailed in a report on Thursday by The Wall Street Journal, which led with a shocking statistic. When online magazine The Atlantic modeled what would occur if Google integrated AI into search, it found that 75% of the time the AI would answer the user’s query without requiring a click-through to its website, losing it traffic. This might have a significant impact on publishers’ traffic going forward, as Google today drives nearly 40% of their traffic, in keeping with data from Similarweb.

Some publishers at the moment are attempting to get ahead of the issue. For instance, Axel Springer just this week inked a take care of OpenAI to license its news for AI model training. But overall, publishers consider they’ll lose somewhere between 20-40% of their website traffic when Google’s AI products fully roll out, The WSJ’s report noted.

The lawsuit reiterates this concern, claiming that Google’s recent advances in AI-based search were implemented with “the goal of discouraging end-users from visiting the web sites of Class members who’re a part of the digital news and publishing line of commerce.”

SGE, it argues, offers web searchers a strategy to seek information in a conversational mode, but ultimately keeps users in Google’s “walled garden” because it “plagiarizes” their content. Publishers can also’t block SGE since it uses the identical web crawler as Google’s general search service, GoogleBot.

Plus, it says Google’s Bard AI was trained on a dataset that included “news, magazine and digital publications,” citing each a 2023 report from the News Media Alliance and a Washington Post article about AI training data for reference. (The Post, which worked with researchers on the Allen Institute for AI, had found that News and Media sites were the third largest category of AI training data.)

The case points to other concerns, too, like changing AdSense rates and evidence of improper spoliation of evidence on Google’s part, by its destruction of chat messages — a difficulty raised within the recent Epic Games lawsuit against Google over app store antitrust issues, which Epic won.

Along with damages, the suit is asking for an injunction that may require Google to acquire consent from publishers to make use of their website data to coach its general artificial intelligence products including Google’s own and people of rivals. It also asks Google to permit publishers who opt out of SGE to still show up in Google search results, amongst other things.

The U.S. lawsuit follows an agreement Google reached last month with the Canadian government which might see the search giant paying Canadian media to be used of their content. Under the terms of the deal, Google will provide $73.5 million (100 million Canadian dollars) every yr to news organizations within the country, with funds distributed based on the news outlets’ headcount. Negotiations with Meta are still unresolved, though Meta began blocking news in Canada in August, in light of the pressure to pay for the content under the brand new Canadian law.

The case also arrives alongside the filing of the U.S. Justice Department’s lawsuit against Google for monopolizing digital ad technologies, and references the 2020 Justice Department’s civil antitrust suit over search and search promoting (that are different markets from digital ad technologies within the newer suit).

“The anticompetitive effects of Google’s scheme cause profound harm to competition, to consumers, to labor, and to a democratic free press,” reads an announcement posted to the web site of the law firm handling the case, Hausfeld.

“Plaintiff Helena World Chronicle, LLC invokes the Sherman Act and Clayton Act to hunt class-wide monetary and injunctive relief to revive and ensure competition for digital news and reference publishing and arrange guardrails to preserve a free marketplace of ideas in the brand new era of artificial intelligence,” it states.

Google has been asked for comment, but one has not yet been provided.

The grievance is on the market below.

Helena World Chronicle, LLC v. Google LLC and Alphabet Inc by TechCrunch on Scribd