Google is a “ bad actor ” indicates that the CEO of people, accusing the company of stealing content

The CEO of the largest digital publisher and printed in the United States has accused Google of being a bad actor for having crawled its websites for supporting AI products from the research giant.

Neil Vogel, CEO of People, Inc. (formerly Dotdash Meredith), an editor who operates more than 40 brands, including People, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, Better Homes & Gardens, Real Simple, Southern Living, Allrecipes and others, said that Google did not play just because it uses the same websites to index for the sites Index for the Google search engine.

“Google has a caterpillar, which means that they use the same robot for their research, where they always send us traffic, as for their AI products, where they fly our content,” said Vogel, speaking during the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference this week.

He noted that three years ago, Google Search represented around 65% of the company’s traffic and which has since fallen to the “high 20s”. (Vogel shared an even more surprising statistic with ADEXCHANGER last month, saying that several years ago, Google traffic represented up to 90% of People Inc. traffic from Open Web.)

“I do not complain. We have increased our audience. We have increased our income,” Vogel told the conference participants. “We are doing very well. What is not good on this subject is: you cannot take our content to compete. ”

Vogel believes that publishers need more leverage in the AI ​​era, which is why it considers that it is necessary to block AI robot robots – automated programs that scan websites to form AI systems – because it can force them to make content agreements. His business, for example, has an agreement with Openai, which Vogel described as a “good actor”.

People Inc. has taken advantage of the latest solution from the Cloudflare web infrastructure company to block AI robots that do not pay, which prompted AI players to approach the publisher with potential content offers. Although Vogel does not directly appoint the companies involved, he said that they were “large LLM suppliers”. No transaction has yet been signed, but Vogel said that the company was “much further” than before adopting the robot blocking solution.

However, Vogel stressed that the Google robot cannot be blocked, as this would also prevent the publisher’s websites from being indexed in Google Search, removing this “20% -ish” from the traffic that Google still offers.

“They know it, and they did not divide their robot. So they are an intentional bad actor here,” said Vogel.

Janice Min, the editor -in -chief and CEO of the Ankler Media newsletter supplier, accepted, calling large technological companies like Google and Meta “Content Kleptoman”.

“I do not see the advantage for us in partnership with an AI company at the moment,” she said, adding that her business blocks AI robots.

Meanwhile, the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, whose company manufactures the AI ​​blocking solution (and which was also on the panel), said that it thought that things would still change in the future with regard to the way in which AI companies behave. He suspected that these changes could be caused by new regulations.

The Cloudflare Exec also wondered if the fight against AI companies using legal solutions around things like the law on copyright, created for the pre-Ai era, was the right answer.

“I think it is a crazy race to follow this path, because, in the law on copyright, generally, the more something is derived, the more it is protected by fair use … What these IA companies do is that they really create derivatives,” Prince said. “And so if you look at the best case law that has come out so far, it is said that the use of anthropic and others – the reason why Anthropic recently settled with all the books of books for 1.5 billion dollars – was for them to be able to preserve the positive decision of the copyright they obtained.”

Prince also proclaimed that “everything that does not go with the world today is, at a certain level, Google’s fault”, because the research giant had taught publishers to enhance traffic on the creation of original content, triggering publishers like Buzzfeed to write for clicks. However, he admitted that Google was in a difficult situation at the moment from a competitive point of view.

“Internally, they are fighting massive on what they are doing, and my prediction is that, at that time next year, Google will pay content creators to have crawled their content and take it and put it in AI models,” he said.