On May 9, News/Media Alliance filed an amicus brief in United States v. Google in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the remedy phase of the Google search antitrust trial. The brief, available here, highlighted the growing importance of publisher content in search engine competition through uses that employ retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
The Alliance noted that other GSEs and AI-search companies must negotiate for access to publisher content to enable their RAG-based AI search. It argued that Google’s unlawful monopoly gives it an unfair advantage as search engines increasingly employ RAG, and therefore urged the court to specifically clarify in the final judgment that publishers may also selectively opt out of RAG to restore competition in search as generative AI search becomes more and more prevalent.
