Google is an illegal advertising monopoly - Judge rules

[Whitey]

Things are heating up for Google (and big tech).
[bbc.com...]

[Conro]

I am very sorry :D

[Fluff_Nutz]

After dropping -20% in traffic yesterday, and traffic continues to drop into today. This is good news. So tired of this instability and drops, none of it seems warranted. Just hope this new announcement continues to be good news. That our chances of survival has increased. Will be interesting. Also, so does this mean that America does have laws against monopolies? Surprising..

[Whitey]

@rustybrick has put together a good analysis over here: [seroundtable.com...]

But Google isn’t going down without a fight, a long fight imo

[EditorialGuy]

Even if the decision sticks (and that will take a long time), I suspect that it will benefit advertisers and other big tech companies more than publishers.

[Whitey]

@rustybrick - Barry Schwartz just highlighted a striking detail from the DOJ’s antitrust case against Google: the court found that Google’s internal chat system was set to auto-delete unless employees manually enabled chat history—something the UI made deliberately hard to do. This setup led to “substantive” conversations disappearing even after the federal antitrust investigation began.

Worse, the ruling says Google execs misused attorney-client privilege to hide internal communications. The judge hinted these actions could lead to sanctions due to spoliation of evidence.

It looks even more evil:

Google’s internal messaging application deleted records of chats between employees unless an employee explicitly turned on “chat history,” Google’s systemic disregard of the evidentiary rules regarding spoliation of evidence and its misuse of the attorney-client privilege may well be sanctionable.

That’s a big shift—from monopoly accusations to potential obstruction. @rustybrick - yes, it could be evil ;

Is this just the beginning of deeper consequences for Big Tech’s internal comms practices?

[Micha]

Google's statement at X “We've won half the case” also says a lot. The company used to be known for its innovation, but under the current CEO it has become Adobe 2.0. I hope something happens soon and other countries follow suit. Japan also gave Google a slap on the wrist this week, and Google is also up against the wall in the UK. The air is getting thinner and thinner.

[mosxu]

David Nunes mentioned that with Big Tech is more the case of 90% bots!

No traffic is coming from AI ? Chat GPT,
Deepseek, AI overviews? Nothing out of trillions of queries ?

[Whitey]

Whatever they're doing wrong by the law, business and society, they're making bucketloads out of search advertising:

Revenue grew +15% Y/Y to $88.3 billion ($2.0 billion beat)

[appeconomyinsights.com...]

[cnvi]

i’ve been screaming about this since 2009 when many said Gs prohibition against Link Exchange wasn’t restraint of trade. Millions of worldwide SMBs would beg to differ.

We have the worlds largest Corporate Class Action Lawsuit waiting in the wings. If just a few mega lawfirms w chutzpah would read the self incriminating “link scheme policies” self published by G. It’s the biggest elephant in this room.

[tangor]

As with most legal actions with monopolies one should expect YEARS if not a DECADE or more before anything actually gets done. Things move a lot slower than back in the day when steel, railroads, oil, Bell were busted apart. On the other hand, the conversation regarding g's dominance has been going on since 2016 or so... could this be the year that things begin to happen?

(Warming up the popcorn machine!)

[cnvi]

The popcorn has been popping for over a decade. Even 60 Minutes did a piece on it - I have a friend who’s brother is a producer for 60 Minutes after the following link below aired. I spoke with him and told the other part of the story that shut down my patent USPTO 7082470 which was not invented to manipulate page rank. Many investigations resulted in that I should seek damages but.couldn’t find an attorney to take it on contingency. I’m plaintiff #1 if an attorney will ever see it through a fresh lens.

[cbsnews.com...]

[Whitey]

I’m plaintiff #1 if an attorney will ever see it through a fresh lens.

Given the current anti Google climate it would be good to approach an attorney to see what their current views would be.

[londrum]

I just hope I'm still around when all these court cases finally conclude and Google are brought down a peg or two. They seem to drag on fifty years with appeal after appeal

[tangor]

50 years? Dang it! I already have near that invested in the web! (Started with bulletin boards back in the 80s)

Still healthy (sorta) but mid 7th decade I might not live long enough to see the end!

On the other hand the world might end before that so none of us will see the end (climate, war, asteroid...)

On the other Other hand let's live for today and see what happens tomorrow.

Meanwhile, g is on notice and I'm seeing a LOT of changes in the algo, the business, and company officers beginning to sweat in public. Things might get interesting a lot sooner than we expect.

Adding a bit of cinnamon to the popcorn butter heating up...

[Whitey]

Check out another illegal monopolistic angle in this:

@brett_tabke: Google testified in court that AI Overviews are trained on your content even if you opt out. The only way to prevent this is to remove your site from search results entirely.

[linkedin.com...]

[tangor]

The only way to prevent this is to remove your site from search results entirely.

Kind of defeats the purpose of search, web, publishers, advertising ...

After all---the AI and LLM REQUIRE OUR content to grow the "machine technology" and if the AI bots DON'T follow robots.txt one can try to make them blithering idiots with malformed HTML (ie. h1 for paragraphs, h2 for page titles, h3 for table data, h4 for section heads, etc.---making it incomprehensible for AI and LLM) which mashup is easily read by HUMANS. If one does not want to play they are only left with DENY to remove the bots ... effectively neutering any possible search ranking---and that leaves the...

Webmaster screwed.

Great business plan.

</rant>

Not a fan of abusive AI, and coercion to appear on the "free web" only makes it more so. Freely acknowledge I am a minority opinion on the subject of AI and LLM. I can also see great benefit possible --- and great abuse. It is the latter that should concern ALL of us because it is OUR content feeding the beast and the beast does not generally reward us for having done so.

[Whitey]

Kind of defeats the purpose of search, web, publishers, advertising

The entire web eco system is being upended and it’s not clear how it will evolve and interact. Break ups, jurisdictional compliances, legal challenges, AI, copyright infringements etc etc. Then, even if you detest Google’s commercial behavior, what will the majority of business’ marketing need to adapt to.

No chrome and all the other ubiquitous products and services provided by Google broken up or not working together? Google is very much the internet as far as digital marketing is concerned.

The web search engine model, never was fair for businesses and probably never will be, even though the landscape is changing. In the face of AI and AI agents, more accurate alternatives are emerging. So how will Google and internetland handle that?

I dunno - watching, watching ;

[cnvi]

We should get together and write a book on the topic.

[tangor]

If one reads just the g threads here at WW, pretty sure that novel has ALREADY been written! :)

[cnvi]

that’s my point between of all that we know including all of the publically available quotes, it would be a great short story sticking to the facts obviously. Something to consider given what we know cumulatively,, I know how to use already published info legally. I just need to build a team willing to put in the work. Free speech would be an alternative to a lawsuit.

[Whitey]

If you think Google's monopoly is illegal and bad, then what about this:

Key Takeaways:

AI is cannibalizing traffic: Google used to send traffic for content. Now, most answers stay on the search page (Zero Click Serps). AI will take this to the extreme.

Creators are losing their incentive: Without pageviews or attribution, there’s little motivation to publish original content online.

The future of the web is at risk: Without some reform, AI will continue to degrade the open internet by draining it of the content it needs to thrive. Soon, AI will only have AI content to scrap.

Some new business model is needed: The current system simply doesn’t reward the upstream value creators. That has to change.

[searchengineworld.com...]

How long will it take for authorities to jump on these copywrite and scraping issues in addition to those of the monopolies, that threaten the functioning of the internet economy?

[Kendo]

copyright and scraping

It has been going on for years. Not much is original. The meaning of "entrepreneur" and "developer" is now "monkey-brain".

Some have the audacity to onsell what they scrape, for example seo services. I have been working on a new blocklist solution and already have 150+ self proclaimed wonders listed. When they change IP the new netblock gets added to the firewall. Some have huge networks and they keep changing netblocks, but it now only takes a couple of minutes to nail them using a simple webform.

[Whitey]

@Kendo – Scraping’s not new, but AI just turned it industrial. Google’s AI Overviews now extract, summarize, and serve content with zero clicks and zero attribution. Creators get nothing.

This isn’t SEO cannibalism—it’s economic expropriation. The upstream value is gone. Why publish if LLMs just strip it and feed users without ever sending them to you?

It’s time regulators looked beyond monopoly and tackled copyright abuse at scale. Without reform, the open web becomes a ghost town—AI scraping AI, while real creators walk away.

[cnvi]

“real creators walk away”. and yet the masses that Google for everything are left clueless and continue to feed the beast because we as experts on the matter who have a choice decide to …. or we can organize and write a best selling book all based on facts not opinion. It would fly off Amazon.

[Kendo]

@Whitey - so true. But they have always argued that anything published on the web is free to use and abuse by anyone... fair use, freedom of information, etc. Laws will not help and if they could it would not be worthwhile until they can be applied in every country. Only the big players can be brought to court. Most will mostly be anonymous or fake.

I see so much of my content being copied/plagiarised that it is sickening. Often I see errors in my logs for pages due to bad links because they came from scraped copies of my website.

The only thing that I can do is try to slow it down. So far I am using my blocklist on one site for evaluation, and since applying it to all pages I already see a 30% drop in traffic.

One problem is telling the difference between a search engine and an AI bot.

[Whitey]

@Kendo said: "They have always argued that anything published on the web is free to use and abuse by anyone... fair use, freedom of information, etc."

@cnvi said: "Real creators walk away... and yet the masses that Google for everything are left clueless..."

You're both right, and here's where it gets critical:

What we’re witnessing isn’t just scraping or SEO erosion, it’s the systematic dismantling of the web’s original value exchange. Google’s monopoly—once built on "sending traffic back" has mutated into a system of AI Overviews that capture value at the top and cut off the source.

For small publishers, bloggers, journalists, educators, niche site operators, this is an existential threat.
For big media? It's forced licensing or extinction.

The legal frameworks aren’t just behind, they’re outdated by design. Copyright law, as it stands, can't address LLM-scale ingestion. And without global reform, it can’t be enforced against AI scraping that’s fast, anonymous, and often cloaked as a “crawler.”

@Kendo "One problem is telling the difference between a search engine and an AI bot."

Exactly. And that ambiguity is weaponized.

But this isn't just about copyright—it's about market power. Google controls the search gate. Now it controls the answer. That’s vertical integration at the cost of every independent voice on the internet.

So what next?

We need automated, enforceable licensing models, at scale.
We need laws that define AI training boundaries and attribution standards.
And most urgently, we need a coalition of small and large publishers to force recognition that AI scraping is not neutral tech—it’s uncompensated economic extraction.

Otherwise, we’ll be left with a zombie web: AI scraping AI, while human creators vanish.

And if we don’t act? Like @cnvi said:

it may be time to write that book. Because if we don’t tell this story, someone else’s bot will... and they’ll monetize that too.

This is beyond just a monopoly. It's monopoly and potential extinction for creativity and the purpose that original copywrite protection was conceived on.

[Kendo]

This problem is easily solved by starting a new CDN that turns the tables by requiring access privileges to view. It can have its own search engine. No-one without access privileges can view any pages... redirected to a join page. Bots and scrapers will not be able to access unless they purchase the rights to do so and the revenue from that can be distributed to the clients on a usage basis. In fact all visitors would need to either join or subscribe to a service that has joined. Those services would be responsible for enforcing policy or face excommunication.

Sound impossible?

The hard part is creating a CDN that can handle the traffic. The rest is easy by requiring a custom web browser and I already have one for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android that can be customised for this purpose..

Who is interested?

[Whitey]

@Kendo – That’s a bold framework, and I see the logic: control access at the infrastructure level, monetize usage, and restore value through enforced licensing. Technically achievable? Probably. Especially if browsers and CDNs can be aligned. Philosophically? It’s a reversal of what made the open web work—discovery, decentralization, and contribution without gatekeepers.

But perhaps that era’s already behind us. If AI is now the default interface, and content is harvested en masse with no attribution or return flow, the premise of open publishing collapses. What’s left is a hollowed-out ecosystem—AI summarizing AI, with no incentive for human input.

The bigger risk is fragmentation: multiple gated webs, each with their own rules, access protocols, and monetization layers. That might protect value, but at the cost of interoperability, discoverability, and the democratic reach of information.

One possible compromise could be a machine-readable licensing layer—like an evolved robots.txt or structured metadata—that signals AI usage terms and supports attribution or compensation. Whether that gains traction depends on pressure, precedent, and policy—but it may be a softer alternative to hard gates.

Where this is heading seems clear: monopolies are shifting from gatekeepers to answer engines. But for webmasters, opportunity may still lie in owning specialized data, building brand equity, and creating value that AI can’t easily replicate or summarize. In a sea of sameness, being uniquely useful might matter more than ever.

What do you think?

[cnvi]

The short answer is that “us” who know what is happening - Webmaster Pioneers should tell this story. If we build a team we can have the story on the market within months. Use the proceeds to build a new bold framework that is noticed by real commercial capital, and also builds support for reinvigorating Berners-Lee WWW. Getting the web back to being a web.

[edited by: not2easy at 6:51 pm (utc) on May 12, 2025]
[edit reason] Please see TOS #26 [/edit]