• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, February 10, 2026

Google, which claims to be the friend of publishers everywhere, is facing a forceful repudiation of that idea by the European Publishers Council (EPC).  

The EPC on Tuesday filed an antitrust complaint over Google’s AI Overviews, a platform that provides short synapsis of articles, just long enough that many readers see no need to click through to the original story, and its AI Mode.

Many publishers were hit with staggering losses of traffic last year — up to 40% for some, reducing their ability to attract and retain advertisers, even as their content was being utilized.

The action complements the enforcement action announced by the European Commission in December 2025. At that time, the Commission said it had “opened a formal antitrust investigation to assess whether Google has breached EU competition rules by using the content of web publishers, as well as content uploaded on the online video-sharing platform YouTube, for artificial intelligence (AI) purposes.” 

In general, publishers argue that tech giants have been grabbing and using their content for free.

The EPC complaint accuses Google of these specific actions: 

1. Systematic traffic substitution and disintermediation
2. Exploitative use of publishers’ content for AI training, grounding, and output
3. Absence of meaningful opt-out or control
4. Unfair trading conditions imposed by an unavoidable trading partner 
5. Undermining of emerging licensing markets 
6. Relevance of copyright noncompliance 
7. Structural and irreversible harm

The complaint also charges that Google has largely avoided the kind of licensing agreements other AI providers have signed with some publishers.  

Publishers are thus faced with this untenable choice, the EPC continues: To retain visibility on Google Search, they must accept that their content is “crawled, reproduced, and repurposed for Google’s AI features,” it states. The technical controls announced by Google do not offer meaningful protection. 

“This complaint is not about resisting innovation or artificial intelligence,” saysChristian Van Thillo, chairman of the EPC. ”It is about stopping a dominant gatekeeper from using its market power to take publishers’ content without consent, without fair compensation, and without giving publishers any realistic way to protect their journalism. AI Overviews and AI Mode fundamentally undermine the economic compact that has sustained the open web.”

Van Thillo adds: "If these practices continue, the damage will be structural and irreversible. No amount of money can restore lost audiences, weakened brand relationships, or eroded reader trust once publishers are disintermediated. Effective competition, media pluralism, and democratic discourse, all objectives rightly at the heart of the European Democracy Shield, depend on timely and decisive enforcement.”

For its part, Google says through a spokesperson: "These inaccurate claims are an attempt to hold back helpful new AI features that Europeans want. We design our AI features to surface great content across the web and we provide easy-to-use controls for them to manage their content," Reuters reports. 

The EPC is calling on the European Commission to enact remedies that would restore competitive conditions, including meaningful control for publishers over use of their content for AI purposes, transparency regarding usage and a fair licensing and payment framework.