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Judge tosses out antitrust lawsuits against Google
Sign up for The A.V. Club's free newsletter to have the best TV, film, and news stories sent straight to your inbox. A federal judge dismissed antitrust suits brought by Penske Media and the education tech company Chegg in a Wednesday filing.
There was a time when typing a query into Google would yield useful, clickable results at the top of the page—no worry of accidentally clicking an ad, no AI gobbling up page space to tell us the thing’s entire history, just an offramp on the Information Superhighway to ease and enhance our online experience. Now, Google uses its technology to Hoover up content from websites for its own use, negating the point of clicking over to sites that need online traffic to continue producing said content, which feels bad and wrong.
Just don’t belabor that point to the federal judge who dismissed the two antitrust lawsuits against Google on Wednesday—he’d simply ask whether you’ve read the “Sherman Act. ” Well? Have you? , among others—and by the education tech company Chegg were tossed out on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District Court for the District Of Columbia Still, Mehta stopped short of legitimizing Google’s practice of scraping other entities’ content to maximize its frequently useless AI Overview feature while allegedly keeping users from clicking away from Google. He suggested that media companies who wish to plead the economic impacts of working under a tyrant tech giant should bring their grievances to America’s famously tech-neutral Congress instead of plugging up the courts with pesky allegations,The Sherman Antitrust Act is the U.S. federal law that prohibits business arrangements that unduly restrict trade and competition.
Mehta, while not “unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in,” was unconvinced by Penske and Chegg’s invocation of the Sherman Act in their suits, both of which he said did not “plead facts sufficient to establish the particular antitrust violations they alleged” under the act. Penske and Chegg said in their filings that their long-term relationship with Google created an expectation of “reciprocal-dealing,” in which the companies allowed Google bots to trawl their sites for content, while in turn Google ensured search traffic.
Penske’s assertion that the advent of Google’s AI Overview directly violates that agreement, an assertion that Mehta rejected.
“An expectation is not an agreement,” he wrote, while also dismissing the idea that a “historical course of dealing” implied an agreement among all parties.
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