The chair of the EPC has stated that the complaint is not about limiting innovation but rather is about preventing powerful market players from taking publishers’ content without consent.
Google, which falls under parent company Alphabet, is at the centre of a new antitrust complaint opened by the European Publishers Council (EPC) on Tuesday (10 February) and filed with the European Commission.
The complaint argues that Google and Alphabet are abusing their dominant position in general search services via the use of AI overviews and AI mode embedded within Google Search.
There are concerns that Google is using journalistic content without the necessary permissions, diverting traffic, audiences and revenue and failing to compensate the original owners of the content.
The complaint stated, “By embedding AI-generated summaries and chatbot-style responses directly into its dominant search interface, Google has transformed Search from a referral service into an answer engine that substitutes original publisher content and retains users within Google’s own ecosystem.
“Google relies on publishers’ high-quality journalistic content as a critical input for AI training, retrieval augmented generation, and output generation. Professionally produced news and editorial content is particularly valuable to AI systems because it is accurate, current, well-structured, and requires minimal cleaning.”
Christian Van Thillo, the chair of the EPC explained that the complaint is “not about resisting innovation or artificial intelligence”, but rather it is about ensuring that dominant key players can’t wield their power to take away a publisher’s consent to share content, or their right to be compensated.
He believes that if such practices are to continue then the damage done could be both 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.”
The complaint notes that while some AI providers have entered into licensing agreements with publishers regarding the use of journalistic content, Google has largely failed to do so.
The EPC said the platform has instead relied on its control of its search service to secure material without remuneration, “thereby distorting competition and undermining the emergence of a functioning licensing market for AI uses of copyrighted works”.
The complainants are of the opinion that publishers are left with an untenable choice. They can either remain visible on Google Search and accept that their content is crawled, reproduced, and repurposed for Google’s AI features. Or opt out which could entail a loss of search visibility that most publishers cannot afford.
The European Publishers Council is calling on the European Commission “to adopt remedies capable of restoring competitive conditions, including meaningful publisher control over the use of their content for AI purposes, transparency regarding content usage and impact, and a fair licensing and remuneration framework that reflects the scale and value of publishers’ content.”
A Google representative responded to the complaint stating, “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.”
The EPC complaint comes amid an ongoing investigation launched by The European Commission in December of 2025. The Commission opened an antitrust investigation into Google over the tech giant’s use of web publishers’ content and content uploaded to YouTube for the benefit of its artificial intelligence.
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