Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) has formally brought antitrust charges against four companies within the Alphabet group, accusing the digital giant of abusing its dominant market position during licensing negotiations with local news publishers.
The antitrust proceedings target Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Limited, and Google Poland. UOKiK President Tomasz Chróstny highlighted that online search tools, personalized feeds like Google Discover, and AI-generated summaries increasingly display news snippets directly within search results. This practice prevents users from clicking through to original publisher websites, stripping media outlets of essential ad traffic and funding needed to sustain independent journalism.
Poland updated its copyright laws in 2024 to implement the European Union’s Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive, establishing a legal framework that entitles publishers to remuneration when platforms use their content. However, UOKiK asserts that Google failed to sign required licensing agreements with the vast majority of Polish press publishers and engaged in illusory negotiations.
According to the regulator, Google refused to provide transparent data regarding how it utilizes press publications, the ad revenues generated from them, or the specific calculation parameters behind its payment offers. This structural information asymmetry left publishers unable to verify the fairness of Google’s offers or present data-backed counterproposals. Because media outlets depend heavily on Google to reach readers, the watchdog argued that the platform exploited its position to impose unfair commercial conditions.
If found guilty of abusing market dominance under competition law, the tech giant faces potential fines of up to 10% of its annual global turnover.
UOKiK clarified that its investigation focuses strictly on market power abuse regarding search results, Google News, and Google Discover, remaining independent from the European Commission’s separate December 2025 probe into Google’s use of publisher content for AI training. The action marks another major European antitrust effort targeting Big Tech, joining UOKiK’s ongoing proceedings into privacy policy practices by Apple and link presentation changes by Meta.