A federal judge in Washington has thrown out two lawsuits that tried to make Google pay publishers for the work its AI search summaries are built from. On Sept. 30, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed the cases brought by Chegg, an education technology company, and Penske Media, which owns several well-known entertainment and media publications, some of which joined the suit too.
The companies argued that Google uses its dominance in search to make publishers hand over their work for free. Google then reuses that work, they said, in AI Overviews, the AI-written answers that sit at the top of its results and can run several paragraphs. A reader satisfied by the summary has little reason to click through to the publisher, the companies said. They said the only sure way to keep pages out of Google's AI is to block Google's crawler, the program that reads websites for its search index, which also drops a site from search results. Google offers a setting that keeps content from being used to improve its AI models, but the companies said it does not stop Google from using pages to train its main AI models or to write its search answers.
They sued under antitrust law, the federal rules meant to protect competition, which begin with the Sherman Act. The heart of their case was that Google had forced an unfair trade: their content in exchange for search traffic. Mehta said the companies had not shown that any such deal existed. The publishers had shown only an "expectation" that Google would send them readers, he wrote. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works." He said those claims "fail to get out of the starting gate." He also rejected their other claims, saying the companies had not shown they were harmed in the way competition law requires and had not properly defined the markets they said Google dominates. Google had argued there was no deal at all, and that what the companies called coercion was its lawful refusal to do business on their terms.
Mehta wrote that he is not unsympathetic to publishers, journalists, educators and other creators "whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation." But he said competition law is no substitute for lawmakers, and that any gap in it is for Congress or regulators to address. Mehta rejected similar claims from online news publishers in a separate case in March.
Mehta issued a final order, which the companies can appeal, and it is not yet clear whether they will. Mehta also declined to decide a separate state-law claim that Google was unfairly enriched by their work, so it was dismissed without a ruling on its merits. The companies did not sue over copyright, so the ruling does not settle whether copying publishers' work to build AI is legal.