Girish Agarwal, Promoter and Director of DB Corp, said, “all the platforms put together have gone to the Competition Commission of India (CCI), filing a case against Google and others”, in response to a question on whether publishers were receiving revenue from platforms such as Google during the company’s Q4FY26 earnings call. Agarwal indicated that the complaint had been filed jointly with other media organisations, but said the company was yet to receive any response from the CCI. He did not specify which other companies were involved in the complaint.
Context: The complaint comes amid growing tensions between publishers and technology platforms over digital advertising revenue and referral traffic. Companies such as Google and Meta dominate digital advertising markets while news organisations bear the cost of producing content that drives engagement across search and social media platforms.
These concerns have intensified following the rollout of Google’s AI Overviews feature, which provides AI-generated summaries directly on search pages. A February 2026 study cited Ahrefs data found that AI Overviews reduced click-through rates for top search results by 58%. In India, industry bodies, including the Indian Newspaper Society, the Digital News Publishers Association (DNPA), and the News Broadcasters & Digital Association (NBDA), approached the CCI in 2022 over Google’s dominance in the digital advertising and news aggregation markets.
Global frameworks for ad revenue sharing: Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, introduced in 2021, aimed to address what the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission described as a “significant bargaining power imbalance” between digital platforms and news publishers. The framework pushed Google and Meta to negotiate commercial deals with publishers for news content.
Canada followed with the OnlineNews Act in 2023, requiring large platforms to compensate publishers for news. Google later agreed to pay CAD 100 million annually to Canadian news organisations, while Meta blocked news links in Canada in response to the law.
Australia is now considering expanding the framework to cover AI-era platform revenues, with the government proposing a 2.25% local revenue levy on companies including Google, Meta, and TikTok if they fail to strike payment deals with publishers.
Why does this matter: As platforms shift from linking users to publisher websites towards generating direct answers and summaries, publishers fear audiences may consume news without ever visiting original sources. Regulators in Europe have already begun scrutinising this shift. Italy’s communications regulator recently sought an investigation into Google’s AI Overviews. At the same time, the European Parliament has raised concerns around the use of publisher content in AI-generated responses without compensation.
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