Judge tosses out antitrust lawsuits against Google

So, yeah, the September 2025 antitrust suits brought by Penske Media Corp.—publisher of Rolling Stone, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, among others—and by the education tech company Chegg were tossed out on Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District Court for the District Of Columbia (per Forbes), who granted the tech company’s motions to dismiss in a 41-page memorandum. (Which must have been pretty demoralizing for Penske and Chegg’s lawyers to read in full.) Still, Mehta stopped short of legitimizing Google’s practice of scraping other entities’ content to maximize its frequently useless AI Overview feature while allegedly keeping users from clicking away from Google. He suggested that media companies who wish to plead the economic impacts of working under a tyrant tech giant should bring their grievances to America’s famously tech-neutral Congress instead of plugging up the courts with pesky allegations, Penske. “That is an issue for Congress [or regulators] to consider,” Mehta wrote.

The Sherman Antitrust Act is the U.S. federal law that prohibits business arrangements that unduly restrict trade and competition. Mehta, while not “unsympathetic to the situation publishers now find themselves in,” was unconvinced by Penske and Chegg’s invocation of the Sherman Act in their suits, both of which he said did not “plead facts sufficient to establish the particular antitrust violations they alleged” under the act. Penske and Chegg said in their filings that their long-term relationship with Google created an expectation of “reciprocal-dealing,” in which the companies allowed Google bots to trawl their sites for content, while in turn Google ensured search traffic. Penske’s assertion that the advent of Google’s AI Overview directly violates that agreement, an assertion that Mehta rejected. “An expectation is not an agreement,” he wrote, while also dismissing the idea that a “historical course of dealing” implied an agreement among all parties.