Another win for Google and AI

Federal Court judge dismissed 2 publisher antitrust suits over AI Overviews.

Judge Amit Mehta threw out claims from Chegg and Penske Media, owner of Rolling Stone and Variety.

Both argued that search runs on an unwritten trade, where publishers let Google crawl their pages and Google repays them with clicks that AI Overviews now keep.

Judge Mehta found no trade to enforce, writing that an expectation of traffic "is not an agreement," just the normal working of a search engine.

The publishers also lacked standing on Google's search monopoly, because their lost subscriptions and licensing fees fall in other markets.