Newspaper federation says ‘traffic killer’ feature violates legislation and threatens to destroy media diversity
Italian news publishers are calling for an investigation into Google’s AI Overviews, arguing that the search engine’s AI-generated summaries feature is a “traffic killer” that threatens their survival.
FIEG, the Italian federation of newspaper publishers, said it has submitted a formal complaint to Agcom, Italy’s communications watchdog.
Similar complaints have been filed in other EU countries. Coordinated by the European Newspaper Publishers’ Association, the aim is to push the European Commission to open an investigation against Google under the EU Digital Services Act.
The threat posed by AI Overviews, which gives users information without them having to click through to the original source by summarising searches with a block of text at the top of the results page, is among the main concerns of European news outlets.
