Judge Mehta dismisses Chegg and Penske suits over Google's AI Overviews

The decision, handed down by US District Judge Amit Mehta, ends a pair of cases that had argued Google's AI-powered search features illegally starved publishers of traffic. Chegg and Penske Media Corporation, the parent of Rolling Stone, sued last year.

Mehta wrote that the plaintiffs had pleaded only an "expectation" that Google would send them search traffic in exchange for free content, adding that "an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."

Mehta is the same judge who ruled against Google in a landmark antitrust case in 2024, as The Verge noted in its report on the dismissal.

What the publishers argued

Chegg and PMC claimed Google abused monopoly power by effectively coercing publishers into supplying content for AI Overviews for free, on pain of disappearing from search results. The suits alleged that Google's practices diverted traffic away from their sites and damaged their revenue. Mehta was not unsympathetic: he wrote that the court is not "unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in," but said antitrust rules cannot substitute for a legislature's decision on how to address the economic impact of "new innovation," according to The Verge.

Publishers are still measuring the damage from Google's AI search overhaul. Traffic to news outlets and smaller websites has taken a steep dive, and this week The Information reported that Google is paying around 100 publishers for contributions to AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini as part of a pilot program, The Verge reported.

The ruling lands amid a broader run of competition decisions touching Google. On Thursday, Editor and Publisher reported that publishers cleared a major hurdle in the separate Google ad-tech antitrust fight, while Search Engine Land also covered that milestone. Search Engine Roundtable summarised the AI Overviews dismissal under the headline that there was no agreement with publishers, and The Times of India and The Economic Times both ran the dismissal. Bank of America called the ad-tech antitrust ruling a "major boon" and raised its target price for ad platform Magnite to $38, according to Moomoo, a data point that says more about where analysts think ad money is heading than about the publishers' case.

Regulators move, Washington signs, Europe shrugs

The same week, the regulatory backdrop kept shifting. Heise reported on 1 October that President Donald Trump and six tech companies, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, xAI and Nvidia, signed a one-page declaration on AI controls at a lunch. The text says each company is responsible for making its own technology safe and for building it so users trust the products. Heise noted that the measures described, internal controls, an oversight team, a board-level committee receiving reports, and regular meetings to develop best practices, are largely things the companies had already announced. The declaration closes by suggesting it might in future be useful to put such measures into rules or laws, Heise reported.

In Europe, the tone is different. Politico reported on 24 September that European tech leaders and cybersecurity experts are pushing back hard on US-generated warnings that AI could end humanity. James Wise, a partner at Balderton Capital and chair of the UK government's sovereign AI fund, told Politico: "I don't think the Terminator is coming at all." Marcus Hutchins, the researcher best known for stopping WannaCry, argued that frontier labs' doomsday theories neglect hacker behaviour. Politico reported that 22 nations adopted a declaration on Monday saying AI must remain under human direction, oversight and control.

Elsewhere in the antitrust and trade file, the South China Morning Post reported on 24 September that US lawmakers introduced the Communications and Technology Transparency Act, which would widen the FCC's Covered List from "communications equipment or service" to "information and communications technology or service." Lenovo was drawn into a patent dispute involving memory devices in the same report. The SCMP also reported on 29 September that Alibaba became an official technology and cloud partner of the Brooklyn Nets and the team's jersey patch sponsor, with a real-time 360-degree replay system at the Barclays Centre from the 2026-27 NBA season.

None of that changes the arithmetic for publishers. Mehta's ruling leaves them with the same option they had before the suits: negotiate, diversify, or litigate somewhere else. The ad-tech case, where publishers cleared a procedural hurdle this week, is now the more promising venue.