In response to the CMA’s announcement today of new Conduct Requirements for Google in their use of publisher content for AI, Tim Cowen, co-founder of the Movement for an Open Web, which filed a complaint about Google’s AI overviews in July last year, said:
“MOW welcomes the CMA’s response to the formal complaint we filed nearly a year ago alongside the Independent Publishers Alliance and Foxglove that Google was taking publisher content without permission or payment. The Imposition of conduct requirements and allowing publishers to opt out of Google’s use for its AI are – in principle – a considerable improvement on previous proposals, but in practice we fear they will be ineffective.
“We are disappointed that the obligations will come into effect only in six months, rather than immediately as in previous cases, and Google will then have nine months to implement, subject to a six-monthly review by way of monitoring thereafter, but for the first year only. This means that a harm that started over three years ago and has been allowed to go un-remedied will continue to be unremedied for another nine months – and we will not know whether compliance has been effective until late 2027. This is not an effective remedy nor, given Google’s history of non-compliance with remedies in other cases, is it likely to be effective in practice.
“The CMA has also indicated that it is willing to accept Google’s promises of compliance with no firm baseline, which was requested by many publishers. It refers, for example to “periodic compliance reporting” but not whether the time period for each report is daily, weekly, or monthly.
“The CMA’s decision here considers the compliance burden on Google to be more significant than the continuing harm to publishers. This is a serious failure to understand the level of peril facing publishers who have seen their traffic and incomes severely reduced.
“We are also concerned that the CMA’s approach to speed of enforcement and oversight is getting longer. In our Privacy Sandbox case the CMA imposed quarterly reporting obligations. Here, the reporting requirements are set at six-month intervals meaning that it’ll be six months before we know if Google is complying and then a further six months before we’ll know if any additional remedies have worked. In a year the majority of independent publishers could be gone. Regulation needs to move at the speed of digital and this decision is not fit for purpose.
“The CMA’s obligations do offer publishers a way forward but only if they deal with enforcement themselves.”