Google fends off news publishers' antitrust lawsuit over online search

By Mike Scarcella

WASHINGTON, March 23 (Reuters) - Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google won a ruling dismissing a lawsuit that accused the tech giant of monopolizing the U.S. online news market and exploiting its dominance in search to extract publishers' content without payment.

U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington in a ruling on Friday rejected proposed class action claims lodged by Arkansas news publishers Helena World Chronicle and Emmerich Newspapers against Google.

The antitrust lawsuit, filed in 2023, claimed Google had become "America's largest news publisher" by leveraging its grip on internet search. The judge said the plaintiffs failed to establish Google has monopoly power in the online news market.

Google and lawyers for the publishers did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Google had denied any wrongdoing and asked Mehta to dismiss the case.

The publishers alleged Google forced them to supply news content for free, and that Google used their information to train its artificial intelligence products and populate its search results pages. They said they risked being “downgraded” in search rankings if they tried to restrict Google’s ability to copy “snippets” of news.

They said in announcing their lawsuit that Google every year “siphons off billions of readers and billions of dollars from publishers through an anticompetitive scheme that extracts their content, publishes it on Google, and diverts readers and ad revenue.”

Mehta found the publishers did not have legal standing to maintain their lawsuit because their injuries were suffered in the online news market, not in the general search market.

The judge also found the publishers' claim that Google used mergers and acquisitions to underpin its alleged anticompetitive scheme was filed too late.

Mehta separately found Google liable in a landmark government antitrust case in 2024 over its online search practices, and last year ordered Google to share data with rivals to open up competition. Google is appealing the order.

The case is Helena World Chronicle v. Google LLC, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 23-cv-03677.

For the publishers: Michael Hausfeld and Scott Martin of Hausfeld

For Google: John Schmidtlein and Kenneth Smurzynski of Williams & Connolly

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