Google’s controversial AI-generated summaries — which have been blamed for crushing the traffic of US news sites — have drawn an antitrust complaint in the European Union from a group of independent publishers.
The filing, submitted on June 30, requests that the European Commission impose interim measures to prevent what it describes as “irreparable harm” to publishers.
Google’s artificial intelligence tools are being blamed for harming publishers’ businesses. Koshiro K – stock.adobe.com
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss,” the complaint alleges.
The complaint comes as damning data revealed that AI Overviews have resulted in 37 of the top 50 US news domains suffering year-over-year traffic declines since its launch in May 2024, according to digital intelligence firm SimilarWeb.
The percentage of web searches related to news that end without a click to a news site jumped to 69% in May 2025 from 56% for the same month last year, SimilarWeb found.
A spokesperson for the Competition and Markets Authority, the EU’s antitrust agency, confirmed to The Post that it received the complaint.
“Last week, we proposed to designate Google with strategic market status in search and search advertising. If designated, this would allow us to introduce targeted measured to address specific aspects of how Google operates search services in the UK,” the rep told The Post on Friday.
A group of independent publishers in the European Union filed an antitrust complaint against Google over its AI Overviews technology. dts News Agency Germany/Shutterstock
AI Overviews are summaries generated using Google’s artificial intelligence models and are displayed at the top of general search results. The feature is available in more than 100 countries. Google began incorporating advertisements into AI Overviews this past May.
The publishers allege that Google’s practice of displaying its own summaries above hyperlinks disadvantages original content and is made worse by the lack of control publishers have over how their material is used.
“Publishers using Google Search do not have the option to opt out from their material being ingested for Google’s AI large language model training and/or from being crawled for summaries, without losing their ability to appear in Google’s general search results page,” the complaint alleges.
The Movement for an Open Web, whose members include digital advertisers and publishers, and British nonprofit Foxglove Legal Community Interest Company are also signatories to the complaint.
“In short, AI Overviews are theft from the publishing industry,” Tim Cowen, co-founder of Movement for an Open Web, told The Post.
“They steal publishers’ content and then use that to steal their traffic before it reaches their site. That’s unfair and a clear breach of copyright principles.”
Cowen added that he wants publishers “to have the ability to opt out of their content being harvested for AI Overviews without fear of being punished in search results.”
The complaint submitted by the Independent Publishers Alliance accuses Google of abusing its dominant position in online search by promoting its own AI-generated summaries over links to original content. Google
“In the longer term we want to see a fair economic and regulatory model that rewards publishers for the value of their works,” he said.
The three organizations are seeking regulatory intervention to address what they say is an urgent threat to competition and access to news.
Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling said the consequences of AI Overviews for news publishers are severe.
“Independent news faces an existential threat: Google’s AI Overviews,” Foxglove co-executive director Rosa Curling said.
“That’s why with this complaint, Foxglove and our partners are urging the European Commission, along with other regulators around the world, to take a stand and allow independent journalism to opt out.”
A Google spokesperson defended the AI Overviews feature and disputed the characterization of its impact on publishers.
“New AI experiences in Search enable people to ask even more questions, which creates new opportunities for content and businesses to be discovered,” the spokesperson told Reuters.
Google added that the company sends billions of clicks to websites each day and that traffic fluctuations can be influenced by many factors.
“The reality is that sites can gain and lose traffic for a variety of reasons, including seasonal demand, interests of users, and regular algorithmic updates to Search,” the spokesperson said.
The claims in the EU complaint echo a similar argument made in a lawsuit filed in the United States by an education technology company, which alleges that Google’s AI Overviews are eroding demand for original content and damaging the competitive ability of publishers, resulting in declines in both traffic and subscriptions.
Google has been subject to antitrust scrutiny in the US and the European Union. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent company Alphabet, is pictured above on May 20. AP
Google has faced several antitrust investigations on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in recent years.
Seeking a Breakthrough in AI Infrastructure Market such as Heywell and Genrack “Over 400 Billion KRW in Data Center Infrastructure Investment This Year”
What Microsoft Data Center looks like [Photo = MS]
As the artificial intelligence (AI) craze drives the expansion of data center investment, leading U.S. manufacturing companies are entering this market as new growth breakthroughs.
The Financial Times reported on the 6th (local time) that companies such as Generac, Gates Industrial, and Honeywell are targeting the demand for hyperscalers with special facilities such as generators and cooling equipment.
Hyperscaler is a term mainly used in the data center and cloud industry, and refers to a company that operates a large computing infrastructure designed to quickly and efficiently handle large amounts of data. Representatively, big tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft (MS), Google, and Meta can be cited.
Generac is reportedly the largest producer of residential generators, but it has jumped into the generator market for large data centers to recover its stock price, which is down 75% from its 2021 high. It recently invested $130 million in large generator production facilities and is expanding its business into the electric vehicle charger and home battery market.
Gates, who was manufacturing parts for heavy equipment trucks, has also developed new cooling pumps and pipes for data centers over the past year. This is because Nvidia’s latest AI chip ‘Blackwell’ makes liquid cooling a prerequisite. Gates explained, “Most equipment can be relocated for data centers with a little customization.”
Honeywell, an industrial equipment giant, started to target the market with its cooling system control solution. Based on this, sales of hybrid cooling controllers have recorded double-digit growth over the past 18 months.
According to market research firm Gartner, more than $400 billion is expected to be invested in building data center infrastructure around the world this year. More than 75% of them are expected to be concentrated on hyperscalers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and Google.
OpenAI has again confirmed that it will unify multiple models into one and create GPT-5, which is expected to ship sometime in the summer.
ChatGPT currently has too many capable models for different tasks. While the models are powerful, it can be confusing because all models have identical names.
But another issue is that OpenAI maintains an “o” lineup for reasoning capabilities, while the 4o and other models have multi-modality.
With GPT-5, OpenAI plans to unify the breakthrough in its lineup and deliver the best of the two worlds.
“We’re truly excited to not just make a net new great frontier model, we’re also going to unify our two series,” says Romain Huet, OpenAI’s Head of Developer Experience.
“The breakthrough of reasoning in the O-series and the breakthroughs in multi-modality in the GPT-series will be unified, and that will be GPT-5. And I really hope I’ll come back soon to tell you more about it.”
OpenAI previously claimed that GPT-5 will also make the existing models significantly better at everything.
“GPT-5 is our next foundational model that is meant to just make everything our models can currently do better and with less model switching,” Jerry Tworek, who is a VP at OpenAI, wrote in a Reddit post.
Right now, we don’t know when GPT-5 will begin rolling out to everyone, but Sam Altman suggests it’s coming in the summer.
While cloud attacks may be growing more sophisticated, attackers still succeed with surprisingly simple techniques.
Drawing from Wiz’s detections across thousands of organizations, this report reveals 8 key techniques used by cloud-fluent threat actors.
