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Alphabet’s Google Wins Dismissal of Publishers’ Antitrust Suit Over Online News

By  |  March 24, 2026

Alphabet’s Google has won a court ruling dismissing a lawsuit that accused the company of monopolizing the U.S. online news market and using its dominance in search to take publishers’ content without compensation, according to Reuters.

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    U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta in Washington on Friday (March 20) threw out proposed class-action claims brought by Arkansas-based publishers Helena World Chronicle and Emmerich Newspapers, per Reuters. The case, filed in 2023, argued that Google had effectively become the country’s largest news publisher by using its strength in internet search to capture and display news content.

    In his ruling, Mehta said the publishers had not shown that Google held monopoly power in the online news market, according to Reuters. He also found that the publishers lacked legal standing to pursue the case because the harm they described was tied to the online news market rather than the broader search market.

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    The publishers had alleged that Google compelled news outlets to provide content for free and then used that material in search results and to help train its artificial intelligence products, per Reuters. They also argued that publishers faced the threat of being downgraded in search rankings if they tried to limit Google’s use of article snippets.

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    Mehta separately found that claims accusing Google of relying on mergers and acquisitions to support the alleged anticompetitive conduct were brought too late, according to Reuters.

    Google had denied wrongdoing and sought dismissal of the case, per Reuters. Neither Google nor the publishers’ attorneys immediately responded to requests for comment, according to Reuters.

    The ruling comes amid broader legal scrutiny of Google’s search business. Mehta separately found Google liable in a major U.S. government antitrust case in 2024 over its online search practices and later ordered the company to share certain data with rivals as part of efforts to increase competition, according to Reuters. Google is appealing that order.

    The case is Helena World Chronicle v. Google LLC, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, No. 23-cv-03677. Reuters reported that the publishers were represented by Michael Hausfeld and Scott Martin of Hausfeld, while Google was represented by John Schmidtlein and Kenneth Smurzynski of Williams & Connolly.

    Source: Reuters