Innovation or Monopoly? Google's "AI Intelligence Overview" Faces Antitrust Complaints
Google is facing an antitrust complaint from the European Union over its "AI Overview" feature, accused of abusing its dominant position in the online search market, resulting in traffic and advertising revenue losses for publishers. The complainant is the Independent Publishers Alliance, which is urging regulators to take action to curb the damage. Google responded by stating that its search service brings significant traffic to websites and emphasized that traffic fluctuations are influenced by various factors. The complaint has garnered support from multiple organizations, calling for the establishment of a content exit mechanism
According to the Zhitong Finance APP, Brussels, July 4 - Public documents reveal that Alphabet (GOOGL.US), Google's parent company, is facing an EU antitrust complaint regarding its "AI Overview" feature. The complaint was filed by the Independent Publishers Alliance and several supporting organizations. The alliance submitted a formal complaint to the European Commission on June 30, accusing Google of abusing its dominant position in the online search market by using AI-generated summaries to divert user traffic, resulting in losses in publisher traffic, readership, and advertising revenue.
The "AI Overview" feature from Google has been launched in over 100 countries since May last year, generating AI summaries placed above traditional search results and starting to insert advertisements. The publisher community pointed out that this feature directly scrapes their original content to generate summaries without providing an opt-out mechanism. If they refuse to allow AI scraping, their websites will lose eligibility for display in Google's general search results. The complaint document emphasizes that this forced participation model poses a survival threat to news organizations and calls for regulatory authorities to take temporary measures to curb the damage.
The European Commission has not commented on this matter, while the UK's Competition and Markets Authority has confirmed receipt of the complaint. Google responded by stating that its search service brings billions of clicks to websites daily and emphasized that traffic fluctuations are influenced by multiple factors such as seasonal demand, user preferences, and algorithm updates, and should not be simply attributed to a single feature change. A company spokesperson stated that the AI search experience expands user inquiry scenarios and objectively provides new exposure opportunities for content creators.
This complaint has received support from the Open Rights Group (which includes digital advertisers and publishers) and the UK nonprofit Foxglove Legal Center. Rosa Colin, co-executive director of Foxglove, bluntly stated that independent journalism is facing a "survival threat from Google's AI summaries" and called for the EU and global regulatory authorities to establish content opt-out mechanisms. Notably, this complaint is linked to a lawsuit from an American educational technology company, which similarly accuses Google's AI summaries of undermining the demand for original content, leading to a loss of subscription users.
Currently, the complainants have also submitted similar requests to the UK's competition authority. This regulatory game spanning the European and American markets reflects the deep-seated contradictions arising from the integration of AI technology into search services, with the balance between innovation boundaries and content rights protection becoming a new focus of global antitrust regulation
