Summary
On September 30, 2026, U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District of Columbia granted Google's motions to dismiss two antitrust suits brought by education company Chegg and by Penske Media Corporation, the owner of Rolling Stone, Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. Both suits alleged that Google used its monopoly in general search to make publishers supply content for search snippets, AI model training and AI Overviews at no cost, on pain of losing search traffic. In a single 41-page memorandum opinion, Mehta held that the federal antitrust claims failed and declined to hear the state-law unjust enrichment claims. He wrote that the court was not "unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in," but that any gap in the antitrust laws was for Congress or regulators to address.
What Happened
Chegg filed its suit (No. 25-cv-00543) on February 24, 2025. Penske Media and nine of its subsidiaries, including Rolling Stone, Variety Media, Deadline Hollywood and Billboard Media, filed theirs (No. 25-cv-03192) on September 12, 2025. Both cases were assigned to Mehta, who had found in 2024 that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in general search and who decided the remedies in the government's case in 2025. The opinion describes the two complaints as "near-identical actions" against Google and its parent Alphabet, alleging several violations of the Sherman Act and a common-law claim of unjust enrichment.
The plaintiffs' central theory was reciprocal dealing. They alleged that Google conditions the referral traffic it sends to publishers on three kinds of free content: material Google republishes in snippets, material used to train its large language models, and material it retrieves and repackages in AI Overviews. Mehta held that these claims "fail to get out of the starting gate" because the plaintiffs had not pleaded an agreement. "Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an 'expectation' that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free," he wrote. "But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works."
The court dismissed the remaining federal counts on separate grounds. Penske's tying claim failed because the complaint did not plausibly allege two separate products or that publishers had no choice but to take the tied product. The monopoly maintenance claims failed for lack of antitrust standing in the general search market, as the court had held for other private plaintiffs, citing its 2026 decisions in suits by Helena World Chronicle and Sensory against Google. The attempted monopolization and monopoly leveraging claims failed because the plaintiffs did not define plausible markets in online publishing and online educational publishing. Having dismissed every federal claim, Mehta declined supplemental jurisdiction over the unjust enrichment counts (Chegg's Count VI and Penske's Count VII), so those claims were not decided on the merits.
At the end of the reciprocal dealing analysis, Mehta wrote that the court "does not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly," and was not unsympathetic to "the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation." Quoting the Areeda and Hovenkamp antitrust treatise, he wrote that the antitrust statutes are not "in any sense a substitute for [a] legislative body addressing questions of . . . economic dislocation caused by new innovation," and, quoting an earlier decision of the same court, that it "is bound to apply the law only as it is written." A final, appealable order (ECF No. 33 on the Penske docket) was entered with the opinion, and the Penske docket was marked terminated the same day. Reuters reported the ruling on October 1, followed by The Verge and Ars Technica.
Why It Matters
The opinion calls the two cases "further entries in a series of private antitrust lawsuits" against Google that build on the government's search monopoly case, and it came from the judge who decided that case. The opinion treats publishers' supply of content to Google's AI features as part of how a search engine works, absent an explicit agreement or condition, a holding that other publishers bringing Sherman Act claims over AI search features would have to get past. It addresses only antitrust; it does not decide whether training on or summarizing publishers' content infringes copyright, the question at issue in the suits against OpenAI, Perplexity and others.
Mehta's statement that any remedy lies with Congress or regulators places the publisher compensation question with lawmakers. The Verge reported the same week that, according to The Information, Google is paying around 100 publishers in a pilot program for their contributions to AI Overviews, AI Mode and Gemini. Whether Chegg or Penske Media will appeal to the D.C. Circuit or refile the unjust enrichment claims in state court is not known; neither company had filed a notice of appeal as of the docket's last entry.
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