Google disputes Cade's thesis on AI-based newspaper remuneration and calls for an end to the investigation

For the company, "any obligation for mandatory monetary compensation must be established through legislation", not through the actions of the competition defense body.

In a statement presented to the municipality, the company states that it does not abuse its dominant position or exploit press vehicles economically, and maintains that the investigation is not supported by Brazilian antitrust legislation or jurisprudence.

In April, Cade opened an administrative proceeding against big tech to investigate possible irregularities. On that occasion, the interim president of the body,

Diogo Thomson, said in his vote that there is strong evidence that Google practices "exploitative abuse of a dominant position" by scraping online journalistic content (copying using robots) to feed search results, using artificial intelligence.

The competition authority is investigating whether Google abuses its position in the search market, in which it holds a share of more than 90%, to benefit from journalistic content without paying press outlets, which would have led to a drop in traffic and advertising revenue.

The case is being processed by Cade's General Superintendence. If the technical area concludes that there are illegalities in the process, it will suggest condemning Google to the agency's court, which will make the final decision and may, at the limit, impose a fine on the company and order the termination of the conduct - or sign an agreement in which big tech would commit to ending the practice being investigated.

In the defense of 108 pages, Google argued to Cade that any obligation to remunerate journalistic vehicles for the use of content cannot be created by decision of the antitrust authority, but only by legislation approved by the National Congress.

According to the company, turning the discussion into a case of abuse of a dominant position would represent a public policy choice, and not an application of competition law.

"The implicit conclusion of Councilor Diogo Thomson's vote - that the referral traffic model is inadequate and that Google should pay publishers monetarily for the use of content - is a legislative policy choice, not a finding of competition law", says the company.

"Any mandatory monetary compensation obligation must be established through legislation."

When it transformed the inquiry into an administrative process, in April, the ANJ (National Association of Newspapers) considered the decision a "historical milestone" in the journalistic industry.

Big tech also refutes the argument that vehicles structurally depend on the search engine to reach an audience.

Citing studies by Comscore, the Reuters Institute and data presented to Cade itself, Google states that less than 30% of Brazilian publishers' traffic originates from their search services, while the majority of visits would come from direct access, social networks, applications and other channels.

The investigation was opened in 2018, investigating whether the company was carrying out so-called "scraping" of newspaper content. But the agency's administrative process expanded the investigation to include the use of artificial intelligence.

Google also argues that publishers maintain control over the use of their content through tools that allow them to restrict or prevent indexing and the use of information in different company products, such as robots.txt, "noindex", "nosnippet" and Google-Extended. For the company, the existence of these mechanisms rules out the theory of compulsory appropriation of content.

According to the company, all jurisdictions that created compensation mechanisms for publishers did so through specific legislation (such as France, Australia, Canada and Germany), not through decisions by competition bodies in these countries recognizing abuse of a dominant position.

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