A Judge Dismisses Chegg and Penske's Antitrust Suits Against Google
A US federal judge dismissed lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media against Google, a setback for publishers worried about the effects of AI search. Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google's conduct is not illegal under antitrust law. Chegg, an education and learning platform, had claimed in its suit that Google illegally scraped its educational content. The gap between the complaint and the ruling is the gap between two kinds of grievance: losing traffic, and losing control of the material used to build an answer. The publishers argued the second; the court answered the first.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Antitrust asks whether competition was harmed, not whether a particular business model got worse. Falling traffic is the symptom publishers can measure; it isn't automatically the injury the law recognises.
Chegg's complaint was at least partly about inputs, though — content taken and reused. That is a different grievance from being outranked, even if both show up as a traffic chart.