U.S. federal judge Amit Mehta dismissed antitrust lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media Corp against Google on September 30. The court held that Google's use of publishers' content in AI-generated search answers — AI Overviews — does not violate antitrust law. Reuters reported the ruling on October 1. Both cases were heard in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia: Chegg Inc v. Google LLC (No. 25-cv-543) and Penske Media Corp v. Google (No. 25-cv-3192).
The Core of the Lawsuits
Chegg, an online education platform, and Penske Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Variety magazines, accused Google of pressuring publishers. The plaintiffs argued that Google forced publishers to consent to their content appearing in AI answers in order to remain in the search index. In other words, publishers faced a choice: agree to have their content used in AI answers, or disappear from search entirely. The plaintiffs claimed Google was thereby siphoning traffic and advertising revenue away from their sites.
According to Ars Technica's independent reporting, Chegg also exposed the technical side of the process: Google's content harvesting enabled its Gemini models to nearly fully reproduce Chegg's educational materials. In the company's view, once Google itself gave a ready answer to a user's question, there was no need to visit its website — and that, it said, caused the sharp drop in site traffic.
Penske emphasized a different angle. The company argued that publishers had no way to stay in organic search results while opting out of AI answers. In other words, a publisher that wanted to keep its search traffic was automatically forced to agree to its content being used in AI summaries. Both companies characterized the practice as a violation of antitrust law and sought protection from the court. According to Reuters, the plaintiffs accused Google of coercing publishers into consenting to the use of their content in AI answers as a condition of remaining in search.
The Judge's Reasoning
In his ruling, Mehta wrote that the plaintiffs' arguments "failed to get past the starting gate." In court practice, the phrase means the claims lacked a legal basis at the very first stage — the case was closed without a hearing on the merits. Mehta, a federal judge for the District of Columbia, concluded that the plaintiffs' arguments were insufficient to prove an antitrust violation. In his view, publishers' "expectation" of traffic from the search engine is "simply how an ordinary search engine works." In other words, a search engine directing traffic is a natural state of affairs, and the violation of that expectation does not automatically amount to an antitrust violation.
"I am not indifferent to the fact that Google is taking publishers' content and reusing it without paying anything. But antitrust law cannot substitute for the task of lawmakers in remedying the economic harm brought about by innovation."
The quote reveals two sides of the ruling. On the one hand, the judge expressed sympathy for the publishers' situation and acknowledged that their content is being reused without payment. On the other, he concluded that the problem should be solved not through antitrust law, but through legislation. As the judge wrote, remedying the economic harm brought about by technological innovation is the lawmakers' job, not the court's.
What the Ruling Means
AI Overviews are AI-generated summaries that appear at the top of Google's search page and answer the user's query directly. The plaintiffs had targeted precisely this feature: in their view, Google was competing with content owners by repackaging publishers' material as AI answers. Mehta's ruling, by contrast, cemented the legal conclusion that the practice itself does not violate antitrust law.
The ruling is notable for dismissing two separate lawsuits at once: the Chegg case from the education sector and the Penske Media case from the owner of entertainment publications were both closed by the same judge on the same grounds. Two independent sources — Reuters and Ars Technica — reported on it separately, and both presented the ruling's main conclusions in the same way. The ruling was issued on September 30 and reported by Reuters on October 1.
At the same time, the judge's reference to "lawmakers" shows that the dispute is not fully closed. In Mehta's view, the economic problem facing publishers is real, but a lawsuit is not the tool to solve it — the matter must be addressed at the legislative level.
