A judge dismisses Rolling Stone and Variety's case against Google

Rolling Stone, Variety, Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, IndieWire. These titles and a handful of others, all owned by Penske Media, sued Google in federal court in Washington, D.C., over the AI-generated summaries that now sit on top of its search results pages. Chegg, an online tutoring and study-help company, had filed an almost identical complaint back in February 2025.

On September 30, both cases were thrown out in one stroke, in a 41-page opinion signed by Judge Amit P. Mehta.

And that same document says Google takes their content without paying for it.

The diagnosis, then a referral to someone else

On page 25, the judge pauses on what the case showed him.

The court does not treat Plaintiffs' alleged harms lightly. Nor is it unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in, and the knock-on consequences to journalists, educators, and other online creators whose content Google takes and repurposes without compensation.

The rest sits in the same paragraph. Antitrust statutes, he writes, are not "in any sense a substitute for [a] legislative body addressing questions of . . . economic dislocation caused by new innovation." And if the case exposes any gaps in antitrust law, "that is an issue for Congress [or regulators] to consider."

A complete diagnosis, followed by a referral to a service that does not exist yet. We measured the damage back in March, with traffic numbers to back it up. This is a regulatory vacuum described by a federal judge, not by a publishers' trade group.

An expectation is not an agreement

Plaintiffs accused Google of forcing a trade: index us in exchange for our free content, which Google then republishes to compete with us. Legally, that requires an agreement. The court finds none.

Plaintiffs have pleaded only that they have an "expectation" that Google will send them search traffic if they make their content available for free. But an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.

The judge spells out what is missing. Nobody proposed terms the other side accepted, no volume or duration was ever negotiated, and no exchange between any publisher and Google shows mutual consent.

Our August 2 piece called this an unwritten deal. The judge validates the word "unwritten" and rejects the word "deal." An entire corner of the web's business model rested on a handshake nobody ever put on paper.

If summaries are a product, so is every other result

Penske tried a second angle: AI summaries, it argued, are a separate product from search, bundled in with it. The court rejects this, citing its own ruling from a related case decided March 20, 2026.

If AI Overviews is a separate product from Google Search, then so is potentially every other type of search result Google delivers.

Penske's lawyers had actually landed the right image at the hearing: search is meant to take a user from one place to another, the second place being wherever the content they want actually lives; AI Overviews, by design, are built to keep people on the results page instead. The judge turns that image against them. If the two were genuinely separate products, users would simply scroll past the summary box to reach the links below it. But plaintiffs allege the opposite, since that is the entire basis of their complaint.

Carving a results page into separate products is a bit like selling a newspaper's table of contents apart from its actual pages.

Nothing about the facts was decided

This is the nuance that disappears in the coverage, and it changes everything. At this stage of the proceedings, the court takes the alleged facts as true. It did not say the harm was imaginary; it said that these facts, even taken at face value, do not add up to any claim the court can hear.

This is at least the third time this year that this judge has sent private plaintiffs home for lack of standing, after one case decided March 20 and another on July 13. And he is the same judge who, in the US government's own case against Google, established that 80% of general search queries ran through Google in 2009, and 89.2% in 2020.

One door stays open: the unjust-enrichment claim was never examined on its merits, since the court declined jurisdiction over it. A "final, appealable order" accompanies the opinion, and the ruling does not mention anywhere the possibility of refiling the complaints, whatever several news reports have since claimed.

France already holds the tool the judge is pointing to

Congress, the judge says. In Europe, lawmakers acted seven years ago: the April 17, 2019 directive on copyright in the digital single market, then France's July 24, 2019 law creating a neighboring right for news agencies and publishers.

The record sits in France's own competition authority rulings. Interim measures against Google in April 2020, upheld by the Paris Court of Appeal. A 500 million euro fine in July 2021 for failing to comply, plus a 300,000 euro daily penalty. Commitments made legally binding in June 2022. Then 250 million more in March 2024, over four of those commitments the authority found unmet.

That last decision speaks directly to 2026. Among the violations it lists, the authority notes that Google had not told publishers and news agencies their content was feeding its AI service, Bard, since renamed Gemini, and gave them no technical way to opt out. To refuse, a publisher had to block all indexing outright, Search, Discover and Google News included, which happened to be exactly the services whose compensation was under negotiation.

A single switch that cuts power to the whole house when all you wanted was to turn off one lamp. Google requested the settlement procedure and did not contest the violations. What French publishers ultimately walked away with, we covered on August 2.

What is left

The difference between the two continents is not how bold their competition watchdogs are. It is that France had an actual law to enforce, and a regulator becomes formidable the moment it is holding a statute instead of building a theory of the market from scratch.

As of October 5, no notice of appeal appears on the public docket in either case. Federal rules leave thirty days after the September 30 order, until October 30. Until then, American publishers are left holding a judicial record that spells out, in writing, exactly what Google's summaries are doing to their business, and that gives them nothing to act on.