This graph is pretty depressing for publishers and their ability to continue making content.

So they are already stealing it, but now they want immunity for their crimes.

Dear Google:

Fuck off.

Google's literal current terms of service

You must not abuse, harm, interfere with, or disrupt our services or systems — for example, by: [...] using AI-generated content from our services to develop machine learning models or related AI technology

So they can freely steal from the rest of the world, but don't you dare from them!

"AI will be the last thing we invent."

Not because technologically it will self-improve and rapidly optimise designs, no.

Because it will kill our entire species' culture leaving us in a souless state of comatose unable to be creative.

What they're doing isn't a crime. They're just reading headlines and producing (very) short summaries. Load Google news and what you see there is the problem.

A lot of the time, people don't want or need to read the full article. Everything they wanted to know is in the headline and occasionally, the byline. When Google or Meta reproduce that headline and/or a super short summary on their sites with the link, the end users are getting the gist of the article without loading the ads that would have been displayed if they went to the original site.

This is fine. It's not a crime. It's not even unethical! They're literally implementing "the web" as it is meant to be used since forever.

If you want to outlaw this, you're advocating for a very ugly reality where people can't even use curl and/or Python to grab news headlines for their own purposes.

Remember when Windows 7 shipped with news headlines in the widget sidebar? That had the same problem (for publishers).

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/06/30/google-demands-changes-to-ai-copyright-laws/

The article since I can't seem to open it from OP

That's not what they're asking permission for. They want unlimited access to copyrighted information for the purposes of training their AI models, not just using the developed models to output article summaries.

Also, on your thing, regardless of whether or not they provide a link to the original source(s), summarizing others work to hijack their ad revenue is absolutely unethical if you think compensating people for their work is ethical and inevitably leads to the decline in actual first-party reporting and real journalism.

The only ones who benefit long-term from an AI-summary-fueled media landscape are those who have a direct profit motive to produce content, aka corporations and government propaganda.

If independent media fails, your Google news feed will just become slopped up versions of coporate press releases and propaganda echo chambers.

Absolute best case scenario in this unregulated hellscape is Google figures out a way to pay the first party reporting groups to keep "independent" journalism alive, but even that basically makes all "independent" media totally dependent on Google revenue streams (not to mention it sounds a lot like "paying to access copyrighted content", the exact thing they're lobbying against).

Finally, Google has made it clear that though they want total ability to modify news coverage as they see fit, they want 0 liability for those modifications. When their AI slops out hallucinations with real world consequences, they want zero responsibility, which is also "unethical".

Thanks for flagging. I somehow pasted a broken link.

Fixed now - sorry about that.

Rules for thee but not for me

IP law has always been the rich doing what they can, and the poor suffering what they must.

So what they're saying is if anyone forms an LLC as an AI company and offers a minim level of terrible service, they can then pirate everything legally.

How about: fuck you, Google. Eat shit