Google and its parent company, Alphabet, are asking a US court to dismiss a lawsuit from Penske Media Corporation, the publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and Deadline.
The company argues that showing artificial intelligence (AI) generated summaries in search results is a normal product upgrade, not an attempt to block competition.
The request was filed on January 12 in Washington, DC. Penske had already updated its complaint twice after earlier dismissal attempts.
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The publisher’s lawsuit claims that Google forces media outlets to allow it to use their articles for AI training and for short summaries. Penske said this setup reduces the number of readers visiting publisher websites.
According to the complaint, Google’s AI Overviews and Featured Snippets show too much information directly on search pages.
Google’s latest filing disputes these points. It stated that adding AI summaries helps users get answers faster without stopping publishers from controlling their own content.
The company notes that site owners can decide whether to be listed on Google Search and can opt out at any time.
In the filing, Google also challenges Penske’s definition of the “online publishing market”. It argued that treating all online text content as a single market stretches antitrust logic beyond reason.
Google’s lawyers point out that similar AI features are already part of other search platforms, such as Bing and DuckDuckGo.
Meanwhile, the European Union recently began investigating Google over possible violations of competition laws linked to its artificial intelligence (AI) search features. What did the Commission say? Read the full story.
