Judge Calls Google's AI Dispute With Publishers "Deeply Unfair"

US federal judge Amit Mehta grilled Google on Tuesday at a hearing over a pointed question: does the company's search-market monopoly give it the right to take publishers' content and use it to generate AI answers? The hearing was held to determine whether the judge would dismiss Penske Media's antitrust lawsuit against Google's AI Overviews feature. Notably, Mehta is the same judge who previously found Google to hold an illegal monopoly in the search market.

Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next (DCN), a trade group representing digital publishers, attended the hearing and recounted the proceedings in detail on social media. According to Kint, Google's lawyers described AI Overviews as a simple "product improvement" and characterized the traditional arrangement — where publishers let Google index their content in exchange for search traffic — as "vague historical practice." Kint's posts suggest Judge Mehta was unconvinced, saying the situation "seems deeply unfair" and noting that publishers have no control over how Google uses their content, and that the company's "product improvement" was effectively built "on the backs of publishers." The judge specifically stressed that a product improvement doesn't grant immunity from antitrust scrutiny.

What particularly caught the judge's attention was that other AI companies pay for content, while Google — leveraging its search monopoly — is "swallowing" the entire internet for free. Penske's representatives cited competitors like OpenAI and Perplexity, which pay for content, while Google obtains the same data for free — raising rivals' costs and building barriers to market entry.

Google officially maintains that publishers can opt their content out of AI training as well as out of AI Mode and AI Overviews. In practice, however, opting out also means losing the modest trickle of traffic Google does send via AI Overviews — traffic already far smaller than what the traditional ten blue links (organic results) once delivered. The case, ongoing since September 2025, has yet to receive a ruling from Judge Mehta on the motion to dismiss, but his questions and comments at the hearing suggest the monopoly established in the US's 2024 antitrust case against Google may now be playing out in its relationship with publishers as well.

The case carries particular weight for marketing and media: it's no secret that search-driven traffic to websites has been steadily declining due to AI's direct-answer mechanisms, a trend that worries publishers and SEO professionals alike. Should the court rule in Penske's favor, it could impose serious limits on giants like Google's practice of using publisher content for free — and reshape the rules of the entire digital advertising and content market.