Penske Media Corporation (PMC) filed a federal court memorandum opposing Google’s motion to dismiss its antitrust lawsuit. The company argues that Google has broken the longstanding premise of a web ecosystem in which publishers allowed their content to be crawled in exchange for receiving search traffic in return.
PMC is the publisher of twenty brands like Deadline, The Hollywood Reporter, and Rolling Stone.
Web Ecosystem
The PMC legal filing makes repeated references to the “fundamental fair exchange” where Google sends traffic in exchange for allowing them to crawl and index websites, explicitly quoting Google’s expressions of support for “the health of the web ecosystem.”
And yet there are some industry outsiders on social media who deny that there is any understanding between Google and web publishers, a concept that even Google doesn’t deny.
This concept dates to pretty much the beginning of Google and is commonly understood by all web workers. It’s embedded in Google’s Philosophy, expressed at least as far back as 2004:
“Google may be the only company in the world whose stated goal is to have users leave its website as quickly as possible.”
In May 2025 Google published a blog post where they affirmed that sending users to websites remained their core goal:
“…our core goal remains the same: to help people find outstanding, original content that adds unique value.”
What’s relevant about that passage is that it’s framed within the context of encouraging publishers to create high quality content and in exchange they will be considered for referral traffic.
The concept of a web ecosystem where both sides benefit was discussed by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a June 2025 podcast interview by Lex Fridman where Pichai said that sending people to the human created web in AI Mode was “going to be a core design principle for us.”
In response to a follow-up question referring to journalists who are nervous about web referrals, Sundar Pichai explicitly mentioned the ecosystem and Google’s commitment to it.
Pichai responded:
“I think news and journalism will play an important role, you know, in the future we’re pretty committed to it, right? And so I think making sure that ecosystem… In fact, I think we’ll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there. So it’s something I think you know I definitely value a lot and as we are designing we’ll continue prioritizing approaches.”
This “fundamental fair exchange” serves as the baseline competitive condition for their claims of coercive reciprocal dealing and unlawful monopoly maintenance.
That baseline helps PMC argue:
- That Google changed the understood terms of participation in search in a way publishers cannot refuse.
- And that Google used its dominance in search to impose those new terms.
And despite that Google’s own CEO expressed that sending people to websites is a core design principal and there are…
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