The chair of the EPC has said that the grievance just isn’t about limiting innovation however fairly is about stopping highly effective market gamers from taking publishers’ content material with out consent.
Google, which falls underneath dad or mum firm Alphabet, is on the centre of a brand new antitrust grievance opened by the European Publishers Council (EPC) on Tuesday (10 February) and filed with the European Fee.
The grievance argues that Google and Alphabet are abusing their dominant place generally search providers through using AI overviews and AI mode embedded inside Google Search.
There are issues that Google is utilizing journalistic content material with out the mandatory permissions, diverting visitors, audiences and income and failing to compensate the unique house owners of the content material.
The grievance said, “By embedding AI-generated summaries and chatbot-style responses instantly into its dominant search interface, Google has reworked Search from a referral service into a solution engine that substitutes authentic writer content material and retains customers inside Google’s personal ecosystem.
“Google depends on publishers’ high-quality journalistic content material as a essential enter for AI coaching, retrieval augmented era, and output era. Professionally produced information and editorial content material is especially invaluable to AI techniques as a result of it’s correct, present, well-structured, and requires minimal cleansing.”
Christian Van Thillo, the chair of the EPC defined that the grievance is “not about resisting innovation or synthetic intelligence”, however fairly it’s about guaranteeing that dominant key gamers can’t wield their energy to remove a writer’s consent to share content material, or their proper to be compensated.
He believes that if such practices are to proceed then the harm performed may very well be each structural and irreversible. “No sum of money can restore misplaced audiences, weakened model relationships, or eroded reader belief as soon as publishers are disintermediated.
“Efficient competitors, media pluralism, and democratic discourse, all targets rightly on the coronary heart of the European Democracy Defend, rely on well timed and decisive enforcement.”
The grievance notes that whereas some AI suppliers have entered into licensing agreements with publishers concerning using journalistic content material, Google has largely failed to take action.
The EPC stated the platform has as an alternative relied on its management of its search service to safe materials with out remuneration, “thereby distorting competitors and undermining the emergence of a functioning licensing marketplace for AI makes use of of copyrighted works”.
The complainants are of the opinion that publishers are left with an untenable selection. They’ll both stay seen on Google Search and settle for that their content material is crawled, reproduced, and repurposed for Google’s AI options. Or decide out which might entail a lack of search visibility that the majority publishers can not afford.
The European Publishers Council is asking on the European Fee “to undertake treatments able to restoring aggressive circumstances, together with significant writer management over using their content material for AI functions, transparency concerning content material utilization and influence, and a good licensing and remuneration framework that displays the dimensions and worth of publishers’ content material.”
A Google consultant responded to the grievance stating, “These inaccurate claims are an try to carry again useful new AI options that Europeans need. We design our AI options to floor nice content material throughout the online and we offer easy-to-use controls for them to handle their content material.”
The EPC grievance comes amid an ongoing investigation launched by The European Fee in December of 2025. The Fee opened an antitrust investigation into Google over the tech large’s use of internet publishers’ content material and content material uploaded to YouTube for the advantage of its synthetic intelligence.
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