Photo Credit: Simon Ray

Google has fired back against Penske Media’s antitrust lawsuit, maintaining, among other things, that the AI-focused claims therein “fail on every level.”

The tech giant just recently moved to dismiss, with Penske Media Corp. (PMC) and several of its divisions having filed the original suit in September. Spanning almost 100 pages, the action contains “the exact same claims in nearly verbatim language” as a complaint submitted by education tech company Chegg in February, per Google.

As we reported two months ago, the Billboard and Rolling Stone publisher says Google’s “unlawful monopoly in search” is enabling it to divert traffic from news sites via AI summaries.

“Google uses that buying power to force online publishers to give up access to their content without monetary compensation,” Penske Media wrote in the original complaint. “Google then itself acts as a publisher, either by republishing portions of other online publishers’ content or by using GAI [generative AI] to summarize the content.”

As for the alleged monopoly’s purported traffic and revenue fallout, “organic affiliate revenues across the [PMC] portfolio have declined by more than a third [from their peak] by the end of 2024,” according once again to the initial suit.

Returning to the dismissal push, Penske’s reciprocal dealing argument (concerning an alleged threat to boot certain sites from search results unless their owners agree to additional content usages) is said to be “nothing more than a claim that Google is refusing to deal with PMC on PMC’s preferred terms.”

“To start,” one dismissal motion section elaborates, “PMC fails to allege a reciprocal dealing claim of any kind. PMC alleges that Google engaged in conduct that, at its core, is based on a supposed refusal to deal with PMC on PMC’s preferred terms. But that is not prohibited under the antitrust laws.”

Meanwhile, the text also takes aim at the suit from the perspective of the agreement (or the alleged lack thereof) between Google and PMC, which, like different publishers, allegedly has the right to “opt out of indexing” altogether.

“PMC’s own allegations make clear that there can be no reciprocal dealing claim (if such a claim were even possible under the law) because there is no agreement between Google and PMC for Google to do anything, let alone on terms of PMC’s choosing,” this section states.

And the way the defendant sees the situation, “to the extent publishers feel pressured to allow Google to index their content, that is a function of competitive pressure from other publishers competing for search engine users’ attention, not Google’s alleged reciprocal dealing (or Google at all).”

While it probably doesn’t need saying in light of the suit’s length, the dismissal document, itself running a healthy 50 or so pages, covers a number of adjacent angles as well.

Admittedly, some of those angles don’t quite make for easy reading and would require a bit of ink to summarize in full. Keeping the focus on top-level takeaways, then, PMC, “since it is not a participant in” the search-engine market, allegedly lacks antitrust standing to claim that Google is harnessing AI features to maintain its purported monopoly.

Plus, Penske’s suit allegedly fails because it “contains no allegations regarding how Google’s conduct has prevented other buyers from paying more for republishing” and AI training – “or how overall market prices for that content would have been higher but for Google’s conduct.”

More generally, Google is framing the AI features in question as search upgrades and accusing Penske of suing instead of “innovating to improve its products and adapt to advances in technology.”

DMN reached out to PMC for comment but didn’t immediately receive a response.