Federal judge dismisses antitrust cases against Google's AI search products

A significant blow to publishers fighting Google's AI integration came this week when a federal judge threw out antitrust lawsuits from education platform Chegg and publishing conglomerate Penske Media (which owns Rolling Stone and Variety). The dismissal suggests courts may be reluctant to constrain how search engines incorporate AI-generated summaries, even when those summaries directly compete with the original publishers' websites.

The publishers' case#

Both companies filed suits asserting that Google was using their content unfairly to power AI Overviews—summaries that appear at the top of search results and often reduce clicks to the original sources. Chegg argued that Google had improperly scraped its educational materials to train Gemini models that could replicate that content. Penske made a related claim: that it was fundamentally inequitable for sites indexed for traditional organic search to have their material simultaneously harvested for AI answers, with no ability to refuse participation.

The judge's reasoning#

US District Judge Amit Mehta, who is also overseeing the DOJ's major antitrust action against Google's search dominance, sided with the search giant. He concluded that neither company had a contractual basis for claiming harm. "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," Mehta wrote. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."

Without a formal agreement between Google and the publishers, antitrust law does not protect them—a ruling that narrows the legal path for content owners seeking redress.

A broader defeat, despite DOJ victory#

The outcome underscores a tension in Google's legal landscape. Although Mehta previously found that Google violated antitrust law in its broader search monopoly, the judge has declined to impose the remedies the government pursued. Google also avoided being forced to divest Chrome, leaving the company's core operations largely intact even as courts acknowledge its dominance.