Ai Overviews, Fieg complaint to Agcom: open proceedings against Google

Newspaper publishers associated with FIEG today lodged a formal complaint with Agcom, in its role as National Coordinator of Digital Services, against Google's "Ai Overviews" service. A similar action, promoted by Enpa, is underway with the Coordinators of Digital Services of other EU countries, with the common and shared objective of obtaining from the European Commission the opening of a procedure under the Dsa (Digital Services Act). With the introduction of Ai Overviews in Italy, and even more recently of its Ai Mode function, Google violates some fundamental provisions of the Dsa, with detrimental effects.

In its technical note, Fieg explains how Google is becoming a 'traffic killer': Google is putting its Ai answers before users' queries by integrating them directly into the list of results, without having to click on the original sources, i.e. the publishers' websites. We are talking about a product - Fieg maintains - that not only directly competes with the content produced by publishing companies, but also leads to a reduction in their visibility and findability, and thus in their advertising revenues, threatening their refinancing. This has serious consequences for the economic sustainability and diversity of the media, with all the risks related to the lack of transparency and the proliferation of disinformation phenomena in the democratic debate.