Google search for Mississippi news on 24 March 2026 with Top Stories box
A judge has dismissed an antitrust case brought by two US news publishers alleging Google has monopolised the online news market via its search business.
The case was brought by Helena World Chronicle LLC, the publisher of 155-year-old Arkansas newspaper Helena World and the digital-only Monroe County Argus, and Mississippi-based Emmerich Newspapers, which publishes 25 print newspapers and 22 websites.
They said they were bringing the lawsuit both on behalf of themselves and on behalf of all publishers of online newsbrands in the US whose websites had been indexed by Google since November 2019.
But after Google filed a motion to dismiss the case, US District Judge Amit P. Mehta said the publishers did not successfully prove they have antitrust standing, meaning that they had suffered harm as a result of the tech giant’s actions within the search market.
Helena World and Emmerich claimed they had “suffered lost profits from diverted customers, higher average costs of production, and lost licensing fees” but this was as publishers of online news, Judge Mehta noted, not as search engines. Google had argued any injuries were “too secondary and indirect”.
In addition, the judge said, the publishers did not plausibly establish that Google has monopoly power in the online news market.
The publishers had argued Google has a 66% share of the online news market because Google and Youtube together received more than 767.8 billion visits between March 2023 and March 2024, making it “by far the largest publisher of online news in the US”.
This analysis included “the top 215 news sites” and, as well as Google’s websites, featured Reddit, Facebook, Yahoo, Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, Twitter, Instagram, Bing and Tiktok.
“Because 66% of all visits to these websites were to Google.com, YouTube.com, or gemini.google.com, Plaintiffs infer that Google possesses that same share of 66% in the online news market,” Judge Mehta said. “That inference is utterly fanciful. It is at once both wildly overinclusive and underinclusive.”
Judge Mehta argued that the numbers reflected total visits to a website regardless of whether someone was visiting for news content. Although this may be a fair measure for a news-focused website, the judge said, it was not a “reasonable inference” for the likes of Google.
The judge also criticised the fact that Google’s figure included Gemini, saying chatbots have many uses that search engines do not. “To incorporate such uses into the baseline share calculation for the online news market underscores how completely untethered it is from reality,” he said.
The figures are “underinclusive” and “unreliable”, he said, because the figures did not include mobile apps – only browsers.
“The purported market share figures therefore do not reflect visits to popular news apps like The New York Times, CNN, Fox News, and The Washington Post.”
The publishers argued that Google and Youtube visits “would still dominate” but Judge Mehta said: “Maybe, maybe not. Plaintiffs cannot rely on pure conjecture to establish market share to allege monopoly power… And in any case, possessing a large market share is alone insufficient to establish monopoly power.”
Judge Mehta added, the publishers had noted it is “relatively easy to enter the online news market” – although there is a “high failure rate” in the market.
The publishers also alleged that Google was engaged in an unlawful tying arrangement, because receiving search traffic was conditioned on them providing Google with “news content for republishing and AI training in the upstream supply chain of the online news market” (although they later tried to update this to refer specifically to AI Overviews instead).
But Judge Mehta said the exchange would be “characterised more accurately as a sale of one product conditioned on the reciprocal supply of another, not a purchase conditioned on another purchase. Coercive or not, this is simply not a tying arrangement in the way courts have understood it.”
Google also successfully argued that Google Search and AI Overviews are not separate products, as required to establish a tying arrangement. The judge suggested Gemini would be a more appropriate product but that the argument would still not be plausible.
Penske Media Corp (PMC), which owns entertainment titles including The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline and Rolling Stone, has its own ongoing lawsuit against Google over the impact it says AI summaries in search are having on its traffic and revenue.
Publishers prominent in Google as ‘news makes search better’
Helena World and Emmerich claimed: “Google has unlawfully maintained and abused its monopoly in the general search market through a ‘monopoly broth’ of anticompetitive acts”.
They argued the end result of this would be a “death blow to America’s already ailing news industry”.
Google is the second-biggest source of traffic for Helena World, behind visitors who come directly, while it is the biggest referrer for at least two out of the 22 websites published by Emmerich Newspapers.
After Google, the next two biggest search traffic referrers for Emmerich Newspapers were DuckDuckGo at 0.17% and Brave at 0.15%.
The publishers therefore argued that online news providers “have only one meaningful provider for the largest source of external traffic: Google”.
Judge Mehta noted that news has become a “prominent feature” in Google’s search results pages and other products like Youtube “in large part because it is a powerful tool in Google’s business model. Put simply, news makes search better.
“Frequently crawling and indexing web content, including digital news, produces fresher, higher quality search results that in turn generate more revenue, more engagement, and more scale (or user data).”
The news industry and Google long had a “symbiotic” relationship, the lawsuit heard, with value being received both ways as publishers gained search traffic referrals in exchange for their content.
But now Google takes news content without compensation to train its AI products as well as “ground” them, meaning they can produce results about current events.
When AI Overviews or other features like People Also Ask and Featured Snippets appear at the top of search results, this pushes down organic links to publisher websites.
As Judge Mehta summarised: “Because these features essentially aggregate and summarise publishers’ original news content, users are likely to be satisfied with the response returned and forego clicking and navigating to the original news content used to create those summaries, thereby decreasing search traffic to publishers’ websites.
“Publishers who wish to restrict Google from republishing their content through such features can only do so at the expense of being downgraded on the SERP, which also leads to lower search traffic.”
The publishers also argued that Google “uses its monopoly power in other ways to online publishers’ detriment”, for example through the conditions imposed if they want to use search optimisation tools like Google Publisher Center and Google Search Console, and by taking news off its platform entirely in regions where lawmakers want it to pay for content.
As a result, the publishers said in their 2024 filing: “Google Search is now a publishing platform for news that competes with other publishers for attention, user engagement, and ad revenue.”
Judge Mehta noted: “At no point in these interactions between publishers and Google is there an exchange of money. By indexing and republishing their original content without paying a fee, Google maintains artificially low costs of production in online news publishing, while at the same time raising publishers’ costs of customer acquisition, data acquisition, and protective measures (like paywalls) and diminishing their ability to bear these costs.”
The publishers alleged that Google’s acquisitions of mobile operating system Android (in 20025), video platform Youtube (2006) and AI company Deep Mind (2014) added to its monopoly position.
They said the extent of Google’s monopoly violations did not become clear until 2023 after the launches of AI tools Gemini and AI Overviews, but the judge concluded this argument was time-barred because the acquisitions occurred nearly ten to 20 years before the lawsuit was filed (with a usual statute of limitation of four years).
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