Media groups sue Google for €2.1 billion, alleging abuse of dominant position

“The media companies involved have incurred losses due to a less competitive market, which is a direct result of Google’s misconduct. Without Google’s abuse of its dominant position, the media companies would have received significantly higher revenues from advertising and paid lower fees for ad tech services. Crucially, these funds could have been reinvested into strengthening the European media landscape,” said a statement from lawyers Geradin Partners and Stek, according to Reuters.

A spokesperson for the company said Google opposes the lawsuit, referring to it as “speculative and opportunistic,” according to The Guardian. “Google works constructively with publishers across Europe. [Our advertising tools] adapt and evolve in partnership with those same publishers.”

The lawsuit comes at a time when the company is facing an existential threat from rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, whose AI chatbot OpenAI could potentially directly compete with Google’s core search business. Google has been trying to fight back against the AI onslaught by launching a beta version of its own “Search Generative Experiences.”

But the company’s tryst with AI chatbots has been more unsuccessful than not. Its Gemini chatbot’s AI image generation tool received a lot of flak for its “historical inaccuracies” and for being “too woke.” After becoming the butt of many jokes on the internet, the image generation capability was pulled down by Google, which promised to improve upon it before releasing it to the public again.