France’s largest press association on Aug. 11 asked the country’s competition watchdog to take action against Google over the company’s artificial intelligence (AI)-generated article summaries, with the group saying the feature was reducing readership in newspapers and magazines.
The Alliance for General Information Press (Alliance Presse), which represents more than 300 titles, including the dailies Le Figaro, Le Monde, and Le Parisien, said in a statement it opposes the recent rollout of AI-generated article summaries by the Silicon Valley company without consultation.
The body said that, according to data from the French Authority for Audiovisual and Digital Communication, traffic on their sites has fallen by between 33 percent and 38 percent due to the AI-generated summaries.
It has urged the French Competition Authority to force Google to propose a payment plan and conduct talks with traditional media seeking fees for the use of their content by AI tools, as it instructed Facebook’s parent company Meta to do last month.
Alliance Presse President Marc Feuillée said in a statement that “the fact that artificial intelligence is built upon press content demonstrates a simple truth: this information holds considerable value.
“Publishers are not asking for innovation to stop. They are asking for that value to be shared and for the use of their work to be remunerated, as required by law,” he added, saying that in the “absence of fair and transparent negotiations,” the group was referring the matter to the authorities.
In 2021, the Competition Authority ordered Google to pay for using French press articles on its platforms, including its search engines, and fined the company 500 million euros ($577 million) after the copyright dispute.
The Epoch Times contacted the French Competition Authority and Google for comment but did not receive a response by the time of publication.
The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) flagged concerns about the tech giant’s dominance in search, designating Google “strategic market status,” which allows it to set targeted rules to increase trust and transparency.
Google accounts for more than 90 percent of British general search queries, the regulator said in January, also stating that it wanted to give publishers more control over how their content was used.
The CMA has said that the requirements imposed on the California company under the digital markets competition regime gave “publishers more control and stronger bargaining power over the use of their content,” while securing a fair deal for Google.
News websites and other publishers have experienced sharp drops in click-through rates as a result of users’ reliance on overviews generated with the help of Google’s Gemini AI.
The CMA said Google would be required to ensure that content from publishers, including news organizations, was properly attributed in AI‑generated search results, using clear links.
Google said in a June 3 blog post that AI overviews were leading people to search “entirely new kinds of questions, creating new opportunities for brands, publishers, and creators to reach people.”
Google further stated that it was testing a new control that lets publishers manage how their links and content appear in generative AI search features, and it said that sites that opt out would not receive traffic from AI Overviews and AI Mode, but the controls would not affect traditional search results.
The European Commission, which acts as the bloc’s executive branch, said in a statement dated Dec. 8 that it would examine whether Google used the content of web publishers for its search engine’s AI-powered services, AI Overview and AI Mode, without adequately compensating publishers or without giving them the option to refuse the use of their content. The probe is still ongoing.
