Independent media outlets have lodged a formal complaint with the EU against Google’s AI Overview search feature, claiming it misappropriates content and causes significant traffic and revenue losses, sparking renewed regulatory scrutiny in Europe and the UK. Report: Antitrust Complaints Against Google Arise Over AI-Driven Search Summaries Impacting Media Traffic Introduction A significant antitrust challenge has emerged against Google concerning its AI-enhanced search service known as ‘AI Overview’, which summarises search results using artificial intelligence (AI) at the top of the results page. Several independent media outlets have alleged that this service is adversely affecting their website traffic and revenues,…

Google is facing a formal antitrust complaint in Europe from a coalition of independent publishers, who accuse the company of abusing its dominance through its AI Overviews feature. The complaint, filed with the European Commission on 30 June, claims the tool harms publishers by extracting information from their content and displaying it directly on search results pages, sharply reducing user traffic and threatening the financial viability of independent journalism. At the heart of the case is Google’s growing use of AI-generated summaries to answer search queries without requiring users to click through to the original sources. Publishers say this practice…

The UK’s competition watchdog is preparing to impose sweeping new rules on Google that could reshape how search results and AI-generated summaries work, potentially transforming how publishers’ content is used and surfaced. The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is expected to designate Google with “strategic market status” (SMS) later this year due to its dominance in search and search advertising. The designation, part of new digital markets legislation, would allow the CMA to enforce a set of binding conduct rules aimed at promoting fairer competition, greater user choice and more control for content providers. Central to the CMA’s concerns is…

Canada is rethinking how it regulates artificial intelligence, moving away from the sweeping framework proposed under the previous government and instead crafting a new set of rules that place copyright and cultural protection at the centre. Evan Solomon, the country’s first federal AI minister, told The Logic the government was not planning to reintroduce the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA) in its original form. Instead, it will pursue a bespoke regulatory model aimed at building public trust and protecting creators – while avoiding a “Wild West” scenario in which AI development proceeds unchecked. A key focus will be how…

The BBC has issued a legal threat to AI startup Perplexity, accusing it of using BBC content without permission to train and power its artificial intelligence tools. The move, first reported by the Financial Times, marks the broadcaster’s first action in defence of its intellectual property against generative AI firms. In a letter to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, the BBC demanded the company stop scraping its content, delete any material already collected and proposed a financial settlement. It claims Perplexity’s tools have reproduced BBC content verbatim and serve as direct competitors by diverting users away from its platforms. The broadcaster…

Harvard University has opened up nearly one million digitised books for use in training artificial intelligence models – a move likely to be closely watched by publishers as they negotiate with or sue AI companies over access to copyrighted content. The dataset, unveiled through Harvard’s Institutional Data Initiative, includes around 394 million pages and an estimated 242 billion tokens, making it one of the largest public domain corpora available for AI research. The collection spans texts from the 15th century onwards, covering more than 250 languages, with a particular concentration of material from the 19th century. It marks the first…

Japan’s main newspaper association has renewed its demand that generative AI companies seek permission before using journalistic content to train their models, warning that current practices amount to “free-riding” and threaten the sustainability of the country’s news industry. In a statement issued this week, the Japan Newspaper Publishers and Editors Association raised fresh concerns about the unauthorised use of news content by AI developers. It pointed to Article 30-4 of Japan’s Copyright Law, which permits the use of copyrighted material for machine learning without prior consent, provided the use does not “unreasonably prejudice the interests of the copyright owner.” But…

Platform accuses chatbot developer of breaching its terms and unfairly profiting from user-generated content. Reddit has filed a lawsuit against the AI firm Anthropic, accusing it of illegally scraping user comments to train its chatbot, Claude. The case, brought in California Superior Court, opens a new front in the growing legal battle against AI firms accused of harvesting online data without consent. According to the filing, Anthropic used automated bots to extract Reddit content in breach of the platform’s terms of use. Reddit’s chief legal officer, Ben Lee, said AI developers must be held accountable for how they gather and…

Around 10,000 Hungarians staged a silent protest on Budapest’s Freedom Bridge to oppose a government bill permitting the monitoring and potential banning of foreign-funded media. Thousands of Hungarians gathered in Budapest this weekend to protest against a proposed law widely seen as a threat to media freedom and civil liberties. Around 10,000 people joined a silent demonstration on the city’s Freedom Bridge, holding signs demanding the withdrawal of the bill put forward by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s ruling Fidesz party. The legislation would allow the government to monitor, sanction and potentially ban media outlets and non-governmental organisations that receive foreign…

The move aims to address tax inequalities, protect media diversity and ensure these corporations contribute fairly to public finances. Germany is preparing to introduce a new platform solidarity levy on global tech giants such as Google and Meta, according to Wolfram Weimer, the culture minister. The 10 percent levy – modelled on a similar system in Austria – is designed to address what the government sees as unfair tax advantages and to strengthen media diversity by rebalancing competition between platforms and publishers. “These corporations benefit enormously from the media and cultural achievements as well as the infrastructure of our country,”…