by
Roger Penske (Penske Media Corporation. photo)
Google, the 900-pound gorilla online, is giving publishers heartburn — and Jay Penske, a St. Mary's Prep of Orchard Lake alum and son of local billionaire Roger Penske, is pushing back.
Penske, of Penske Media Corporation— which publishes Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, and other media outlets — has filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against Google over the use of his content in AI Overviews. These are AI-generated summaries of search results that appear at the top of the page, Forbes reports. He is the first major publisher to date to sue Google.
Forbes reports:
The federal antitrust lawsuit accuses Google of abusing its dominance in search to force publishers into a lopsided deal: basically, Google requires media companies to either allow their reporting to be used in AI Overviews or accept being down-ranked in Google Search. Penske’s complaint argues that this practice isn’t fair and has caused significant financial harm, with the company’s affiliate revenue falling by more than a third — a result of Google’s AI Overviews co-opting traffic that might have otherwise gone to Penske outlets.
More importantly, Penske describes this dynamic as anticompetitive behavior from a company abusing what the federal government has already described as Google’s monopoly status in the realm of Internet search. Penske says roughly 20% of Google searches that lead to his sites now display AI Overviews — and here’s the rub: those summaries lift material from publishers’ work, answer the user’s query directly on the results page, and prevent readers from clicking through.
Penske, 46, currently lives in Los Angeles. His father, Roger Penske, 88, who lives in Oakland County, is a former race car driver and the founder, chairman, and CEO of Penske Corporation, a transportation services company. Forbes puts the elder Penske’s net worth at $7.4 billion.
