European Publishers Council has formally filed an antitrust complaint with the European Commission, accusing Alphabet Inc. and its subsidiary Google of abusing their dominant position in general search.

The complaint targets the rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode inside Google Search, arguing that these features breach Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union by distorting competition and exploiting publishers’ content without fair compensation.

This move complements the Commission’s previously announced investigation into whether Google has unlawfully used publishers’ content, including material hosted on YouTube, for AI training and related purposes.

From Search Engine to “Answer Engine”

At the heart of the complaint is a structural shift: Google Search is no longer acting purely as a referral mechanism. Instead, by embedding AI-generated summaries and conversational responses directly in search results, it increasingly keeps users within Google’s own ecosystem.

According to the EPC, this transformation:

Reduces traffic to original publisher websites
Weakens audience relationships
Undermines advertising and subscription revenues
Erodes the economic foundation of professional journalism

Publishers argue that Google is using high-quality journalistic content as a key input for AI training and retrieval-augmented generation systems. News content is especially valuable for AI models because it is structured, fact-checked, current, and requires minimal preprocessing.

Yet, the complaint claims this usage happens:

Without meaningful authorization
Without fair remuneration
Without an effective opt-out mechanism

In practical terms, publishers face what the EPC calls an “untenable choice”: remain visible in search and accept AI reuse of their content, or opt out and suffer a significant loss of visibility.

Competition Law Meets Copyright Law

The complaint frames Google’s conduct as a potential abuse of dominance under EU competition law. But it also highlights possible systematic breaches of EU copyright law, including publishers’ neighbouring rights under the DSM Copyright Directive.

The argument is twofold:

Google’s market dominance in search makes publishers unavoidable trading partners.
Its AI integration imposes unfair trading conditions by repurposing copyrighted content without establishing a functioning licensing market.

This contrasts with other AI providers that have entered into explicit licensing agreements with media organizations. The EPC argues that Google’s control over search allows it to bypass such negotiations, distorting competition and preventing the emergence of a sustainable licensing framework for AI uses of journalistic content.

Strategic Implications for the AI Ecosystem

The EPC warns that the consequences could be structural and irreversible.

Smaller, regional, and specialist publishers are likely to be the first affected. As revenue and traffic decline, media diversity may shrink, weakening democratic resilience across Europe.

There is also a second-order risk: if professional journalism becomes economically unsustainable, the long-term quality of AI-generated outputs may degrade. Large language models depend on a continuous supply of accurate, professionally produced content. Undermining that supply could weaken the reliability of AI systems themselves.

This creates a paradox: AI systems benefit from high-quality journalism, yet the mechanisms currently used to power AI features may erode the very ecosystem that produces it.

What the Complaint Demands

The European Publishers Council is asking the European Commission to implement remedies that restore competitive balance. These include:

Meaningful publisher control over AI use of their content
Transparency regarding how content is used and its impact
A fair licensing and remuneration framework
Conditions that enable a functioning market for AI-related content rights

Why This Matters for Tech Leaders

For CTOs, product leaders, and digital platform architects, this case signals a broader regulatory shift.

AI is no longer evaluated only through the lens of innovation and product velocity. It is increasingly assessed in terms of:

Market power and ecosystem impact
Data sourcing and content rights governance
Structural effects on digital competition
Long-term sustainability of content supply chains

The EPC complaint underscores a critical tension in today’s AI economy: innovation at scale must coexist with fair access, compensation, and ecosystem sustainability.

As generative AI becomes embedded into core platform experiences, regulatory scrutiny will move upstream, focusing not just on model performance, but on data provenance, market leverage, and systemic impact.

For companies building AI-powered search, recommendation engines, or content summarization tools, the message is clear: architecture decisions are now regulatory decisions.

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