Google is destroying independent websites, and one sees no choice but to defend it anyway

For Wikihow, Google is both Tormentor and Savior. And Wednesday, while the research giant rose in the current trial on Ad Tech remedies, the practical site came to the rescue of Google.

Wikihow CEO Elizabeth Douglas described in a court how websites are the middle of an “AI apocalypse”. Wikihow, a website that gives practical advice step by step, suffers from a new paradigm change in the way people find information online. Thanks to new AI tools, including AI chatbots and Google AI AI IA in its search results pages, web users click less and less on websites – and accordingly, seeing and clicking on ads on their sites less.

Despite Google’s role in this change, Douglas sees the advertising technology tools she uses from Google as a rock for her business. In the middle of chaos to adapt to the existential threat of the generative AI, Douglas testified that the announcement supplied by Google of Wikihow “is the stable part of my company at the moment”, even if the income of this company is decreasing. To complete the advertising sector, Wikihow also has a content license agreement with Google which, according to Douglas, represents 10 to 15% of its income – and its conditions do not prevent Google from training its IA previews on WikiHow pages. While government regulators seek to break Google’s advertising activities, Douglas is worried that the forced divestment of one or two Google advertising tools can disturb the only part of its business which can keep lights on while it determines how to adapt to a generational change.

Judge Leonie Brinkema is responsible for imposing a solution that will restore competition on the two markets for the publisher’s advertising technology tools which she found google illegally monopolized. The Ministry of Justice says that this must include a forced sale of ADX, the advertising exchange of Google, and perhaps also DFP, its advertising management tool for publishers. Google has spent most of this week to assert that would present new problems, including potential difficulties for customers. Douglas’ testimony has demonstrated the challenges of small publishers – but also the role that other Google products played in the creation of pressure cooker publishers treat first.

This pressure cooker is the trend towards “Google Zero” or the point to which Google no longer refers to research traffic to third -party sites. Reference traffic traffic has decreased for many publishers, because Google has added features such as IA glimpses, which may have the effect of preventing users from clicking on a web page if they have obtained the information they needed the Google results page. This could be good for a user, but it also means that the websites on which Google AI have probably been trained can no longer disseminate users’ advertisements that can monetize their sites. Google has denied that its IA previews are uniformly preventing users from clicking on real websites, but it has also declared the court in a file that “the open web is already in rapid decline.” (He then corrected the file to clarify that it intended to refer to advertising on open web displays – the market in question in the case.)

Douglas may not be a fan of everything Google does, or her illegal monopoly, but she told court that a disruptive break in her advertising tools would simply add another headache for publishers who already have so much on their plates. She prefers not to have to focus her efforts on the implementation of a new announcement service system or troubleshooting new problems instead of responding to existential threats to her business. She warned that a new buyer cannot continue the high level of human support she receives from Google, can obtain less money from publishers and that certain advertising technology alternatives are much less reliable than Google. We have never paid the advertising revenue made by his tools before going bankrupt, she said.

But while the government began its counter-examination of Douglas, it has become clear that it did not know some of the ways that the court already found that Google had injured publishers like it. It is not entirely unexpected – Google’s anti -competitive behavior has been buried in complex technical auctions that occur in second fractions to disseminate advertisements on publishers’ websites. Douglas did not know that Google invoiced a rate of taking via ADX that the court judged higher than what would exist on a competitive market, because Wikihow sees the net price until the end of the auction.

And Douglas feared that if Adx was no longer part of Google, that would not be able to bring it a single source of request from advertisers, rather than the same demand pools that overlap other announcements of announcements. But it did not make the source of this unique request – the own Google advertising network – was maintained unique and operated by Google to form an illegal link between its publisher products who ultimately harmed publishers.

For Wikihow, Google can be one of the main engines of its existential commercial threat. But it is also the friendly account manager, by ensuring that technology behind its declining income source works as expected.