Publishers lose Google case, for now | The Free Press Initiative

Published 11:00 am Tuesday, March 31, 2026

Andrew Bagley fought the giant and lost, at least in round one.

Bagley is publisher and co-owner of three weekly newspapers in Arkansas, including the Helena World Chronicle that was the named plaintiff in a private antitrust case against Google.

Owners of dozens of newspapers joined the suit — alleging harm from Google’s monopolies including lost profits, higher costs and lost licensing fees — and were trounced. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., sided with Google and dismissed their case on March 20.

This doesn’t bode well for the prospect of courts leveling the playing field for publishers seeking fair compensation for their work online. But there are more lawsuits pending. Some are drafting on antitrust rulings that found Google illegally monopolized search and digital ad technology. Others allege copyright theft by AI companies taking their work without permission.

Bagley said his group may appeal.

“Obviously we’re very disappointed. Our attorneys are reviewing it and then once I get advice from them, we’ll see how to go forward,” Bagley said.

Bagley doesn’t have time to sulk. He has stories to write and papers to produce, plus two other jobs keeping him afloat.

“I’ve got me, two part-time staff and some stringers trying to run three papers,” he said. “And I make so much money, I’m also the athletic director at the local community college and teach history.”

Helena World Chronicle, LLC et al v. Google LLC was “yet another in the volley of antitrust lawsuits brought against Defendant Google LLC arising from its dominance in the market for general search services,” U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta wrote in his ruling.

Mehta noted that harms publishers suffered “may very well be” the result of stifled competition in the search market. But he decided they “are not within the general search services market at all.”

Publishers failed to establish their standing to pursue the case and failed to establish “that Google has monopoly power in the online news market,” he wrote.

Mehta must be Google’s favorite judge. He oversaw the federal case that found the company illegally monopolized search, but rejected prosecutors’ request that Google be defanged by divesting its Chrome browser and Android mobile platform.

I was surprised Mehta rejected publishers’ complaint about Google requiring them to provide royalty-free access to their work, if they want to use its industry standard search tools. Regulators in the U.K. are cracking down on this, prompting Google to consider letting publishers opt-out of the bundling.

Mehta’s ruling acknowledges the issue, writing that “this self-evidently benefits Google and harms online news sites.”

“By indexing and republishing their original content without paying a fee,” he wrote, “Google maintains artificially low costs of production in online news publishing, while at the same time raising publishers’ costs of customer acquisition, data acquisition, and protective measures (like paywalls) and diminishing their ability to bear these costs.”

But Mehta concludes there was no illegal tying arrangement, because there wasn’t an explicit agreement requiring publishers to buy another product from Google.

Google was also found guilty in a second federal and state antitrust case, over its dominance in the digital advertising marketplace. A different judge is now considering how to remedy that situation.

The advertising antitrust case may be a stronger basis for publishers’ antitrust cases, if they aren’t made whole by remedies. That case found Google shorted publishers by effectively rigging the dominant system for buying and selling online ads.

I requested an interview or comment from Google and didn’t hear back before my deadline.

Bagley still believes small, local newspapers are getting hosed by Google, which is now worth around $3.5 trillion.

“We experience at the local level a lot more adverse impact from Google and its related entities than I think most people realize, and I’ll just give you an example,” Bagley said in a phone interview.

“We had a story once where we had exclusively obtained bodycam footage and put a story up behind our paywall of the incident,” he said. “And somebody … put it on YouTube and then when you search for keywords related to that story, you had to go to the second page of Google search results to even find us. It was driving people to that YouTube page that got it after we had been the ones to fight the fight to obtain it.”

Bagley said that “gives you one example of the challenges that small news organizations face when against these online behemoths.”

“So I was a little surprised at the ruling,” he said. “I thought it was clear, after the Justice Department’s case that they are engaged in an illegal monopoly, but the judge obviously didn’t agree.”

Bagley co-owns the Helena paper, the Monroe County Argus and the Mariana Courier-Index.

Print accounts for most of their revenue but their future is online, where Bagley sees younger audiences turning for news. He said it’s “hugely important” that smaller papers are able to get compensation from companies benefiting from their work.

“Just from that one example that I gave you, you see that we do the work, we get the story out there, and then it ends up on Google’s platform and then their search engine steers people to the Google platform,” he said. “They’re not doing the work to get this material. They’re using their AI tools, their search engine tools and other platforms to take advantage of the work we’re doing, and that’s where the expense is.”

If this isn’t resolved in courts, the news industry may need to renew its pursuit of federal legislation to help it negotiate fair compensation. That’s working in places like Canada and Australia where policymakers agreed local news is a public good that must be saved, and didn’t cave to tech giants.

A certain history teacher said that’s long overdue.

“I think this is one of those areas where there should have been legislative intervention,” Bagley said, “so we wouldn’t have had to go the courts.”