A new class action lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court in D.C. accuses Google and parent company Alphabet of engaging in anticompetitive behavior that harms news publishers. Filed by Arkansas-based publisher Helena World Chronicle, the lawsuit argues that Google's actions violate U.S. antitrust law, including the Sherman Act. It specifically points to Google's new AI technologies, such as the Search Generative Experience (SGE) and Bard AI chatbot, as exacerbating the problem.

The complaint filed by Helena World Chronicle alleges that Google "siphons off" news publishers' content, readers, and ad revenue through anticompetitive means, effectively "starving the free press." According to the lawsuit, Google's practice of sharing publishers' content on its platform results in billions of dollars in losses for publishers.

The suit also targets Google's older question-and-answer technologies, including the "Knowledge Graph" launched in 2012. The complaint states that Google compiled its massive database of information by extracting content from publishers' websites without authorization, essentially misappropriating their content.

Additionally, the lawsuit highlights Google's "Featured Snippets" feature, which extracts answers from webpages and reduces traffic to publishers' websites.

Of particular concern to publishers is the impact of Google's AI technologies on their businesses. A report by The Wall Street Journal revealed that when online magazine The Atlantic modeled the effects of Google integrating AI into search, 75% of the time, the AI would answer user queries without requiring a click-through to publishers' websites. This could potentially result in a significant decrease in traffic for publishers, considering that Google currently drives nearly 40% of their traffic.

Publishers anticipate losing approximately 20-40% of their website traffic once Google's AI products are fully integrated. Axel Springer, for example, has already taken steps to address this issue by signing a deal with OpenAI to license its news for AI model training.

The lawsuit argues that Google's recent advances in AI-based search are designed to discourage users from visiting publishers' websites. SGE, in particular, allows users to seek information in a conversational mode but ultimately keeps them within Google's "walled garden" by plagiarizing content. Moreover, publishers are unable to block SGE because it uses the same web crawler as Google's general search service.

The complaint raises additional concerns, including changes in AdSense rates and evidence of improper spoliation of evidence by Google. The lawsuit seeks damages and an injunction that would require Google to obtain consent from publishers to use their website data to train its AI products. It also requests that publishers who opt out of SGE still appear in Google search results.

This lawsuit follows Google's recent agreement with the Canadian government, in which the search giant agreed to pay Canadian media for the use of their content. Negotiations with Meta, previously Facebook, are still ongoing after Meta blocked news in Canada over the pressure to pay for content.

The case coincides with the U.S. Justice Department's lawsuit against Google for monopolizing digital ad technologies and references the 2020 Justice Department's civil antitrust suit against Google for search and search advertising.

Helena World Chronicle seeks class-wide monetary and injunctive relief to restore competition in digital news and reference publishing. The lawsuit aims to establish safeguards in the evolving era of artificial intelligence to preserve a free marketplace of ideas.

Google has not yet provided a comment on the lawsuit.