Statement: News/Media Alliance Applauds Department of Justice Remedies in Landmark Google Antitrust Lawsuit

The Department of Justice (DOJ) submitted its proposed remedies framework to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in connection to the historic antitrust lawsuit against Google for its anticompetitive practices in U.S. general search services and U.S. general search text advertising, including against news media companies. This first submission by DOJ of a high-level remedies framework kicks off the new remedies phase of this litigation, which will continue through a hearing set for April 2025.

Danielle Coffey, N/MA President & CEO, stated, "These remedies will go a long way towards addressing the broken marketplace created by Google's monopoly practice of leveraging existing market power in search to extract unfair terms from content creators throughout its walled garden. Its anticompetitive behavior is unacceptable and unlawful, and Google must be held accountable."

Proposed behavioral and structural remedies would prevent default agreements for search products and provide choice on Chrome and Android. Remedies could embrace opening up Google Play Store. The proposal would require Google to open up their index, data, etc., to be shared by others, subject to privacy limitations; would prevent Google from leveraging monopoly in search to feed AI products, prevent Google from undermining rival AI search engines, allow publishers to opt out of training and RAG (retrieval augmented generation) for AI summaries. The proposal would also address search text ads, proposed remedies would limit the ability to use AI for advertising, and make available to search text ads feeds.

"The news media industry has been harmed by this persistent marketplace imbalance and Google's outsized search dominance coupled with A.I.-powered search that acquires and repurposes news media content without compensation. Although we had hoped DOJ would have gone farther to mandate competitive rates for traditional search, the remedies proposed are forward-leaning and could potentially prevent future exclusionary behavior," Coffey continued.

The lawsuit was based on years of investigation, including a whitepaper "How Google Abuses Its Position as a Market Dominant Platform to Strong-Arm News Publishers and Hurt Journalism," submitted by News/Media Alliance. In addition, the Alliance has previously encouraged DOJ to investigateGoogle's use of publisher content in generative AI search products as echoed by Senator Klobuchar in a letter to the DOJ and FTC. News/Media Alliance also released a whitepaper, "How the pervasive copying of expressive works to train and fuel generative artificial intelligence systems is copyright infringement and not a fair use."

Coffey added, "We applaud the DOJ for addressing present and future harm to publishers that help ensure the publishing industry has the needed investments to produce and distribute quality journalism."