Judge tosses publishers' Google suit
A judge dismissed a group of newspaper publishers' antitrust case against Google, finding the plaintiffs failed to define the relevant market or show Google's dominance and anticompetitive conduct. (ppc.land) The ruling noted that any antitrust remedy must be tailored to the specific wrong alleged. (ppc.land)
A federal judge in Washington threw out a proposed class action from two newspaper publishers that accused Google of monopolizing online news. The ruling, issued March 20, said the publishers did not clear basic antitrust hurdles. (law.justia.com) The plaintiffs were Helena World Chronicle, an Arkansas publisher, and Emmerich Newspapers, a Mississippi-based chain. They sued Google and Alphabet in December 2023 in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, before Judge Amit P. Mehta. (courtlistener.com) (law.justia.com) Their theory was that Google used its power in general search to become “America’s largest news publisher” by indexing news, showing snippets in search results, and using publisher content in products including Gemini and other generative artificial intelligence tools. They said that conduct diverted traffic, cut licensing revenue, and left publishers little choice but to let Google crawl their sites. (law.justia.com) (ppc.land) Mehta said the case broke down first on standing, which is the legal requirement that the plaintiff be the right party to sue over a specific market injury. He wrote that the publishers’ alleged harm was in online news, not in the general search market where Google’s dominance has already been litigated. (law.justia.com) (pressgazette.co.uk) He also said the publishers failed to define a plausible “online news” market or show that Google had monopoly power inside it. The opinion rejected their effort to infer a 66 percent market share from traffic across a basket of 215 sites that included Google, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, Wikipedia, Bing, TikTok, and others. (pressgazette.co.uk) (law.justia.com) The court also dismissed a tying claim, which is an antitrust allegation that a company illegally forces customers to take one product to get another. Mehta found the complaint did not plausibly show a coercive tie between Google Search and Google News or other Google products. (law.justia.com) (medianama.com) Another part of the case ran into the clock. Mehta said claims tied to Google acquisitions such as YouTube, Android, and DeepMind were filed too late under the Clayton Act’s statute of limitations, describing those allegations as 10 to 20 years old. (law.justia.com) (platformeconomyinsights.com) The decision lands in a strange moment for Google. Mehta was also the judge who ruled in August 2024 that Google illegally maintained monopolies in general search and search text advertising, and Google later lost a separate United States ad technology case in April 2025. (justice.gov) (axios.com) That contrast helps explain the ruling’s central point: winning an antitrust case against Google still requires a market definition, a direct injury, and a remedy tied to the conduct actually alleged. In this case, Mehta said the publishers did not connect those pieces tightly enough to get past a motion to dismiss. (law.justia.com) (ppc.land)
