French Press Group Urges Antitrust Action Over Google AI Summaries
French press alliance asks competition regulator to intervene over Google's AI article summaries, citing traffic loss and unpaid content use.
A French press association has formally requested that the country's competition watchdog take action against Google over its AI-generated article summaries, arguing that the feature is siphoning readers away from news websites without fair compensation.
The Alliance of General Information Press, which represents newspapers and magazines across France, said the recent rollout of AI summaries was carried out without consulting publishers. The group is calling on the regulator to impose a remedy similar to one previously applied to Meta, which required the tech firm to present a payment plan and resume negotiations with media outlets seeking fees for the use of their content in AI tools.
In a statement, the alliance said the unilateral deployment of new uses of press content, without prior authorisation or dedicated remuneration, disregards commitments made by Google. The group also cited estimates from the French communications regulator, Arcom, indicating that traffic to publisher sites has fallen by between 33% and 38% as a result of AI-generated summaries.
Marc Feuillee, the alliance's president, said the fact that AI is built upon media content shows that this information has considerable value, and publishers are demanding that this value be shared.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The request comes four years after the competition watchdog fined Alphabet's Google €500 million ($576.8 million) in a copyright dispute over the use of French press articles on its platforms, including its search engine.