News Publishers Try To Sic the Government on Google AI

A journalism industry trade group is asking the federal government to thwart a tech tool that could make news publishing less profitable.

Google's pivot to artificial intelligence has news publishers freaking out—and running to the government.

"Agency intervention is necessary to stop the existential threat Google poses to original content creators," the News/Media Alliance—a major news industry trade group—wrote in a letter to the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). It asked the agencies to use antitrust authority "to stop Google's latest expansion of AI Overviews," a search engine innovation that Google has been rolling out recently.

Disrupting the Search Status Quo

Google's plain old top-of-page links to news outlets or other informational sites are disappearing in many searches. Now much of this prime search-results real estate is taken up by what Google is calling AI Overviews.

Overviews offer up short, AI-generated summaries paired with brief bits of text from linked websites. (If you haven't used Google in a while, try it now and see for yourself.)

The results have been far from perfect (would you like some glue with that pizza?) and leave a lot of room for skepticism and interpretation. (This past weekend, Overviews fed me seemingly contradictory advice about baby fevers within a two-paragraph span.) But that's also often true of what you would find from an old-school list of links and snippets. And Google has been inching away from link-prominent results for a while now, featuring brief bits of (non-AI-generated) content in response to many search queries and in the form of Q&A text throughout link pages. So the recent appearance of AI-generated text answers wasn't even immediately noticeable to me.

But newspaper and magazine publishers sure are noticing.

Overviews give "comprehensive answers without the user ever having to click to another page," the The New York Times warns. And this worries websites that rely on Google to drive much of their traffic.

"It potentially chokes off the original creators of the content," Frank Pine, executive editor of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing (owner of 68 daily newspapers), told the Times.

The emphasis should be on potentially—it's not at all clear yet how the change will affect traffic flows. "We do continue to see that people often do click on the links in AI Overviews and explore," Liz Reid, Google's vice president of search, told the Times. "A website that appears in the AI Overview actually gets more traffic" than a basic link does.

"Publishers said in interviews that it was too early to see a difference in traffic from Google since AI Overviews arrived," the Times reports.

But they still want to punish Google preemptively for daring (once again) to disrupt media business models in a way that news organizations don't like.

A Demand for Antitrust Action

In its letter, sent May 28, the News/Media Alliance asked the government to take action against Google's use of AI. The Alliance wants the agencies to investigate what it calls Google's "monopolistic misappropriation of publishers' content" and to use federal antitrust law "to stop Google's latest expansion of AI Overviews."

It's always amazing to me how an industry so supportive of civil liberties that benefit them (such as freedom of the press) can be so indifferent to freedom in other realms. Here we have a journalism industry trade group asking the federal government simply to shut down a tech tool that might make publishing less profitable.

"Google is…starving publishers of traffic and creating conditions that encourage users to remain on its platform instead of clicking through to get the information directly from the original content creators," the News/Media Alliance complained in a press release.

But publishers have no right to eyeballs—and especially no right to have Google send eyeballs their way.

Imagine if department stores of yore demanded the government intervene to stop shopping malls or big-box retailers from siphoning off customers. Or if book publishers demanded intervention to stop movie theaters from stealing readers' leisure time. Most people would recognize such demands as ludicrous, because we all understand that existing entertainments and platforms have no right to demand an unwavering audience for all time.

Media websites have gotten used to Google searches sending them a certain amount of traffic. But that doesn't mean Google is obligated to continue sending them that same amount of traffic forever—and no amount of handwringing about Google AI citing or linking to websites will change that.

"Google is abusing its power in search to use publishers' content—without payment or permission—to power Google AI Overviews and its other GAI products to exclude competition," the News/Media Alliance letter argues. But there's an easy way for a website to opt out of this: don't be indexed by Google, or provide snippets for it to use.

A website not optimized to show up in Google results, or set to show up as just a link with no accompanying text, will not be "misappropriated" by Google's AI tools. The Alliance admits as much in its letter, noting that publishers could opt out of AI Overviews by "opt[ing] out of search distribution." But opting out would render websites "effectively invisible to large swaths of readers," it states.

Of course, websites can find readers by people visiting their sites directly, coming from direct links, clicking through from social media and news aggregators, and other non-search ways. But being accessible via Google benefits publishers greatly, so they're hesitant to forego that in order to opt out of AI Overviews.

Now, it's certainly understandable that publishers want to be able to use Google in a way that benefits them without any tradeoffs. But that isn't a realistic business model and it isn't a realistic demand.

Reaping and Sowing

It is possible that Google's pivot to AI was hastened by how hostile news media has been to tech companies.

We've seen publishers demanding that search engines and social platforms pay them for the privilege of sharing news links, even though this arrangement benefits publications (arguably more than it does tech companies) by driving traffic. News outlets from the U.S. to Australia and Canada have been trying to orchestrate what amounts to a link tax, which would charge these tech companies for linking to them. (No matter how many times I type that, I will not get over how dumb it is.)

And we've seen a constant stream of complaints from news media about the kinds of articles that search engines and social platforms feature—that they're too partisan, contain too much misinformation, etc.

Is it any wonder that when given the opportunity to downplay news results, these tech companies have taken it?

Antitrust Means Whatever Government Wants It To Mean

In a more sane world, Google's pivot to AI would mean less antitrust madness.

Part of the argument for using antitrust law against Google has been that its search engine was a monopoly that could never be disrupted. But AI tools looked like they could be a threat to Google's typical search, in a way that lawmakers and regulators did not predict. Once again, technological dynamism does a better job disrupting old paradigms than regulatory or legal action.

Rather than simply let other companies win out in the AI arms race, Google started integrating artificial intelligence into its search engines. We have yet to see how this turns out in the long run. The important point is that Google didn't ask the government to intervene to save the search engine model of yore; it innovated.

Newspapers and publishing outlets could learn a lot from this. Alas, they seem more keen on leveraging the Biden administration's anti-tech antitrust agenda to their benefit.

The administration doesn't seem to see Google's disruption by AI as a strike against its theories of search-engine monopoly. It's just revising its talking points: Now it wants to investigate AI content deals, according to Jonathan Kanter, who runs DOJ's antitrust division.

At a recent conference at Stanford, PYMENTS reports, "Kanter asserted that the Justice Department has the authority to take action under the antitrust principle of monopsony, which occurs when a buyer in a supply chain wields excessive power, leading to reduced prices and disincentivizing production. He warned that without competition to adequately compensate creators, AI companies could exploit monopsony power to an unprecedented extent, with severe consequences."

Rather than reflect on the way artificial intelligence is challenging their notions about tech monopolies, officials seem determined simply to steamroll ahead, pivoting their antitrust agenda to whatever new tech comes their way.

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Today's Image

There was no Sex & Tech newsletter last week because I was busy moving into this little slice of suburbia:

Patio furniture forthcoming (ENB/Reason)

 

Comments

[Dillinger]

>>A male birth control gel is showing promising results in trials.

word. who's gonna want that beta?

[mad.casual]

A male birth control gel is showing promising results in trials.

Fuck you. Male birth control has been around longer than female birth control. The problem is that while women have continued to mistreat men while shouting "Toxic Masculinity" and "TEH PATRIARKEE" and insist that free birth control and even abortions be provided to them by law, the male equivalent has been criminally restricted for more than 30 yrs.

[Longtobefree]

So these propaganda outlets are going to destroy all their computers and return to using pencil and paper, and handset type?
All they have to do is stop using the web.
No website, no problem, right? A.I. can't not link to you if you aren't even 'there'.

[Chumby]

AI overviews are like Reason articles.

[Bubba Jones]

NYT can block Google from their site.

Problem solved.

[Eeyore]

Never click on links to "unsafe" sites, like nytimes or reuters.

[AT]

You don't hate journalists enough.

Lazy, inept, entitled babies.

[BYODB]

Last I checked, plenty of major news organizations are operating at a loss and are only afloat because their billionaire baby daddy needs an outlet to further their personal political agenda. Calling them ‘profitable’ is questionable, at best.

Oh, look, Reason is actually one of them!

Keep in mind that, while the operating at a loss part is a somewhat new thing, the furtherance of the owners political agenda is not. That’s been around since at least the American revolution, and more likely since the invention of the written word itself.

[sarcasmic]

Nice digs!

[JeremyR]

I think a bigger problem is AI being wrong. While something things are obvious, like the glue and pizza example, apparently there was a recent problem with the stock market causing stock shares to drop magically and AI reported that incorrectly, causing potential financial mayhem

[charliehall]

I personally have had ChatGPT make up scientific journal articles that don't exist.

At least the MAGA crowd references real journal articles that have fatal methodological flaws to support their junk science.

[Rick James]

"Google is…starving publishers of traffic and creating conditions that encourage users to remain on its platform instead of clicking through to get the information directly from the original content creators," the News/Media Alliance complained in a press release.

But publishers have no right to eyeballs—and especially no right to have Google send eyeballs their way.

No, they do not, but publishers also have a right to not have their content scraped, and then regurgitated by a bot instead of being sent to your site.

This, in my estimation is going possibly one of the bigger, little talked about aspects to AI. While everyone (including Reason) has lost their minds over AI, like almost every previous technology, it will be both used for good and for evil in equal measure. Reason's Interesting Goulash Recipe article yesterday is Reason's OMG THEY'RE USING FACIAL RECOGNITION EVERYWHERE article. But I digress- because that's a different AI issue.

This one is more nuanced. Modern LLM "AIs" are little more than sophisticated regurgitation machines. Let's put the contentious issues of CNN and the AP aside, and just discuss a mundane topic such as... oh, wristwatches. let's say you have a web page which deals with all things wristwatches. You have done deep dive into vintage models, you write articles on the technology, mechanisms, movements, you do reviews, detailed descriptions of models, what the manufacturers are doing etc.

Since AI doesn't come up with anything original, it mostly regurgitates stuff it's been trained in, imagine users do a search on a topic that your website has a strong presence in. Then, if users google something related to that topic, you discover that the Google AI, at the top of its search results throws in a paragraph about that topic in a way that's a loosely disguised version of what you wrote, or content on your web site, but doesn't send the user to your site-- from which you derive revenue from clicks.

I can see how this is going to be a VERY contentious topic in the years to come. This is going to be a sticky area for the courts to sort out.

[Rick James]

FYI, we've already got court doctrine and precedent for this in some ways.

Going back to my wristwatch example, which I like because it's completely politically neutral and therefore doesn't trigger people's TDS, some years ago, someone made a wristwatch news aggregator. It took all the articles from the most popular watch websites and put them into a single interface and app that people could seamlessly read from, without having to visit the individual sites. Sure enough, the site owners started to complain and threaten legal action, so the app stopped aggregating all the sites that complained and pretty soon, the app became useless and they discontinued it. And it makes sense. If a bunch of people literally make their revenue from people visiting their sites, that was potentially thousands of visits cut off at the knees because now the aggregator app scrapes the site once and then re-presents the article elsewhere.

Also, I think this might alight with the old FCC disclaimer thingy that television programs used to preface some of their content with, "It is illegal to retransmit this broadcast". Why would 'retransmitting' the broadcast annoy the broadcast company? Same reason. If I retransmit the program, I can alter it and literally insert my own advertising. When the original broadcast takes a commercial break, I can insert my own commercials, depriving the original broadcaster eyeballs.

I'm guessing the courts will be settling this crap for years.

[charliehall]

I hope that the news outlets win. The AI bots should pay a royalty every time they use information from some other source. Copyright law you know.