Overview

• On July 4, the Independent Publishers Alliance, together with Foxglove and the Movement for an Open Web, filed an antitrust complaint with the UK Competition and Markets Authority after submitting a similar case to the European Commission on June 30.
• The filings call for immediate interim measures that would allow publishers to opt out of Google’s AI Overviews without sacrificing their placement in general search results.
• They cite SimilarWeb analysis indicating that 37 of the top 50 US news domains suffered year-over-year traffic declines and zero-click searches climbed to 69% since the AI Overviews debut.
• The Competition and Markets Authority plans to designate Google under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 in October, granting regulators new powers to enforce fair terms for news publishers.
• Google counters that AI Overviews send billions of clicks to websites daily, purposely exclude hard news queries and enhance publisher engagement.