• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Siding with Google, a federal judge has dismissed an antitrust lawsuit by newspaper publisher Helena World Chronicle LLC and community news publisher Emmerich Newsapers, which claimed the tech company monopolizes a market for online news.

The ruling, issued Friday by U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta in Washington, D.C., came in a suit brought in late 2023 by the publishers. They claimed that Google wielded monopoly power in the general search market, and that this power enabled Google to also monopolize a market for online news.

"Google has leveraged its search monopoly and acquisitions such as YouTube and DeepMind to gradually transform into the world’s largest news publisher," the publishers wrote in a May 2024 amended complaint.

Mehta rejected that theory, writing, "Plaintiffs have not plausibly established that Google has monopoly power in the online news market."

The publishers alleged that Google commanded a 66% share of the market for online news, but Mehta said that figure was "unreliable," and calculated based on a methodology that no "credible expert" would use.

The news companies attempted to prove their claim by citing Semrush data regarding total U.S. visits from March 2023 to March 2024 to "flagship" sites of 215 major outlets -- including social platforms like Instagram and Reddit as well as news sites like NYTimes.com and BBC.com. Semrush's statistics showed approximately 472 billion visits to Google.com and 295 billion visits to YouTube, according to a "traffic data chart" submitted by the publishers as an exhibit to their complaint.

The Helena World Chronicle and Emmerich said the visits to Google properties, including YouTube, accounted for 66% of all visits to the outlets examined by Semrush, and that Google therefore had a 66% share of the market for online news.

Mehta rejected that interpretation of the data, writing people visit major platforms like Google's search engine and YouTube to find a wide variety of material, not just news.

"The way plaintiffs see it, a visit to YouTube.com to watch an old music video, to Instagram.com to view a loved one’s social media posts, or to Reddit.com to join a thread about the best cookies in the District of Columbia each count towards defining online news market shares," he wrote.

Mehta added that the plaintiffs' "traffic data chart" doesn't appear to account for visits to news sites through apps.

"The purported market share figures therefore do not reflect visits to popular news apps like The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and The Washington Post," he wrote. "The Traffic Data Chart’s failure to account for app visits makes plaintiffs’ market share figures unreliable."

Mehta previously ruled against Google in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Department of Justice, finding that the company monopolized the market for "general" search, but ruling that it didn't address the news publishers' claims regarding online news.