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Google AI Overview Faces Antitrust Complaint in UK and EU

Elizabeth Greenberg

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google ai overview
Google is coming under more antitrust fire, this time from publishers over its AI Overview feature. 

Google is facing an antitrust complaint in the UK and the EU over its AI Overview from the Independent Publishers Alliance.

First reported by Reuters, the complaint by the group of publishers alleges that Google has misused web content for their AI Overviews which now appear automatically as part of Google Search.

These overviews “have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership, and revenue loss,” the complaint states.

Publishers are stuck, however, saying that unless they hide their work and platforms entirely from Google Search they cannot opt out of their work being used in Google’s AI overviews.

Google, however, told Reuters that claims about web traffic may be based on skewed and incomplete data, and that web traffic fluctuates for a number of reasons.

The complaint, which was received by the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and the European Commission, was also signed by The Movement for an Open Web, a group of digital advertisers and publishers, as well as Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company, a UK non-profit focused on fairness in the tech sphere.

While Google’s AI Overview was introduced to Google Search last May, it is not the first move by the tech giant which keeps people on the Google Search page rather than selecting a different website.

Google often provides fast facts and Wikipedia previews, as well as questions asked by other users with short form answers, when a user submits a search. These methods make Google content and platforms often the top search result on Google Search, with The Markup finding that 41% of Google’s first page of search results dedicated to Google content and products in their 2020 investigation.

The Google AI Overview has also come under fire from users as Google has not created an option for users to disable the AI search output.

Further, early research into the environmental consequences of Google’s AI Overviews found that the automatically generated AI answer to simple queries uses about 10 times more energy than a traditional Google Search.

Elizabeth Greenberg

Staff Writer

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