French press alliance demands action against Google AI summaries

The Alliance of General Information Press (APIG), representing approximately 300 French newspapers and magazines, has called on France’s competition authority to intervene against Google. The group is protesting the deployment of ‘AI Overviews’ in France, which provide AI-generated summaries of search results directly to users.

APIG argues that these summaries deprive publishers of necessary traffic and revenue by providing information without requiring users to click through to the original sources. Citing estimates from the communications regulator Arcom, the alliance claims that AI-generated summaries could lead to a reduction in site traffic of between 33% and 38%.

The association demands that Google respect previous commitments made in 2022 regarding neighboring rights and copyright. They are seeking competition-law scrutiny and fair remuneration for the use of journalistic content to train and power these AI features. This follows a previous legal dispute where Google was fined approximately 250 million euros for failing to respect agreements with French publishers.