The Judge Just Said Out Loud What Publishers Have Been Thinking

2026-08-27 — marketing implementation consulting

A judge walked into a hearing on Tuesday and told Google their entire AI Overviews story didn't add up. Not in some abstract sense. Just—didn't add up.

This is Judge Amit Mehta. The same one who found Google an illegal monopoly a few years back. He was hearing Google's motion to dismiss Penske Media's lawsuit over AI Overviews, and somewhere in the middle of it, he stopped letting the company have its framing.

Here's what Google argued: AI Overviews is just a "product improvement." Publishers can opt out if they want. The whole arrangement—you let Google crawl your site, Google sends you traffic—is a "vague historical course of dealing." Nothing unusual. Nothing worth antitrust scrutiny.

The judge basically said: actually, no.

Mehta noted that OpenAI and Perplexity are paying for content. Google is using its search monopoly to ingest everything on the internet without paying a dime. One of those things is not like the other. He also pointed out that publishers can't really opt out—not without losing whatever scraps of traffic AI Overviews sends their way, which is far less than the old ten blue links ever provided.

This is the part that matters.

When you have a monopoly in search and you add a feature that shows answers without sending people to the original source, you're not improving the product. You're extracting value from the people who created the content you're showing. Google keeps saying publishers have a choice. Mehta seemed to understand that a choice made under duress isn't really a choice. Product improvements, he said, aren't automatically immune from antitrust law just because they're improvements.

Actually, that's not quite right—he was more careful than that. He said the monopoly power itself might be what lets Google move things around unfairly. The dominance in search is the problem. That's the thing enabling everything else.

None of this means Penske wins. Mehta hasn't ruled on the motion to dismiss yet. But judges don't usually sit in hearings and tell one side "this seems really unfair" unless they're genuinely unsettled by the defense. Google's lawyers walked in with what they probably thought was a clean argument: this is just how search evolves. They walked out into a room where someone kept asking why competitors are paying and Google isn't.

For years, most publishers just accepted Google's terms because they didn't have leverage. Now there's an actual argument in front of an actual judge about whether that leverage itself was the problem. Whether Google got to decide what was fair because Google already controlled the space where fairness gets defined.

The judge thinks something here is broken.

Source: "Penske Media Corporation argues that Google has abused its internet search monopoly to coerce publishers into allowing their content to be used for AI products, resulting in less online traffic." — Courthouse News Service