Publishers sitting pretty in Google and Microsoft's epic AI dance off

Microsoft CEO says he fears Google will throw its $1.7 trillion war chest at publishers to buy exclusive rights to news content to win the war for GenAI

A billion-dollar lifeline was thrown to the publishing industry yesterday as the tech-tonic battle between Google and Microsoft over AI flared up in an antitrust court.

On the stand was the Department of Justice’s bombshell witness, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. And he didn’t disappoint.

He warned Judge Amit Mehta that Google would only extend its dominance over the internet if it was left unchecked.

“You get up in the morning, you brush your teeth and you search on Google,” he said.

Then he dropped the mic for publishers with a quote that everyone in media should pin to their wall.

Bloomberg quoted Nadella saying:

The search giant could accelerate its current lead by using the massive profits it makes from search ads to pay publishers for exclusive rights to content it can use to make its new AI-based search better than rivals.

“Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web,” he was reported to have said by follow Substack Big Tech on Trial. “What is publicly availa…