Google has built a neat little trap for publishers, and the door just clicked shut in Cannes. People Inc. CEO Neil Vogel went on the record this week calling Google's practice of using the same crawler for both search indexing and AI training an 'incredible abuse of market power.' The trap: block the crawler to protect your content from being fed to Google's AI, and you disappear from search results entirely.
The Setup Is Almost Elegant, If You're Into That Kind of Evil
Here is the situation as Axios reported it from Cannes, where publishing executives apparently gather in the South of France to describe how they are being slowly eaten alive. Neil Vogel, who runs People Inc., said plainly: 'We can't actually block Google, because Google uses the same crawler for search as they do for AI.'
That one sentence contains a whole hostage situation. Publishers who want to stop Google from vacuuming up their content to train AI models have exactly one tool at their disposal: blocking the crawler. Except blocking the crawler means blocking your search traffic. And search traffic, as Axios points out, remains a core driver of advertising and affiliate revenue for most publishers. So the choice is: let Google take your content for free, or go dark.
What Publishers Actually Want Here
Vogel was not calling for war, exactly. He told Axios that People Inc. would 'love to do something productive' with Google. That sounds like a man who knows he has no leverage but is still trying to start a negotiation, which, respect for the attempt.
The problem is that Google has no particular incentive to negotiate. Why cut a deal when the current arrangement lets you train AI on the entire internet for free, backed by the implicit threat that any publisher who objects will lose their search visibility? That is not a negotiation. That is a protection racket with better branding.
This Is Not a New Complaint, Which Makes It Worse
Publishers have been screaming about this dynamic for a while now. The argument has always been that Google's AI Overviews pull answers directly from publisher content, display them in search results, and eliminate the need for users to click through to the actual article. Less traffic, less ad revenue, slower death.
What Vogel's comments add to that picture is the structural piece: the thing that makes it a trap rather than just a competitive disadvantage. The crawler design is not an accident. Bundling search indexing and AI training into a single bot means there is no opt-out that does not also amount to professional suicide. Whether that was intentional from the start or just a conveniently sticky design choice is a question Google has not felt compelled to answer publicly.
So Where Does This Go?
Vogel told Axios the relationship with Google is 'probably heading toward' something, and then the quote ends there, which is either a transcript cut or a man who thought better of finishing that sentence in public. Either way, it does not sound like he is expecting a warm partnership announcement.
The more likely destinations from here are litigation, regulation, or both. There are already active antitrust proceedings around Google's search dominance in multiple jurisdictions. The EU's AI Act and related digital market rules give European regulators at least some tools to push back on exactly this kind of bundled-power play. Whether American regulators, who spent years fumbling the simpler Google antitrust cases, are ready to engage with the AI layer of this is a much harder question.
The Broader Wreckage
People Inc. is not a scrappy blog run out of someone's apartment. It is a major digital media company operating some of the most trafficked content brands on the internet. When a company at that scale goes to Cannes and describes feeling completely powerless in its relationship with a platform, that tells you something about how far the power imbalance has tilted.
Smaller publishers are in far worse shape. They have less legal budget, less leverage, and less public platform to even make the complaint. For most of them, the calculation Vogel described is not a strategic problem to be managed. It is just the water they swim in.
The Dingo Take
Let's call this what it is: Google built a perfect snare and called it infrastructure. By running one crawler that handles both search ranking and AI training, they made it structurally impossible for publishers to consent to one without consenting to both. That is not a market. That is Google dictating terms to an entire industry and daring anyone to sue them about it.
And the deeper absurdity is that the content Google is feeding into its AI products, the articles and reviews and guides that make AI Overviews actually useful, those exist because publishers paid journalists and editors and photographers to make them. Google is not creating that value. It is extracting it. The publishers get to watch their traffic numbers fall while Google's AI gets smarter on their dime.
Vogel said he is probably heading toward something with Google but would not say what. Honestly, the something he is heading toward is a courtroom, because that is where every version of this story ends up eventually. The only real question is whether regulators will finally move fast enough to matter, or whether they will catch up to this problem around the time AI has already replaced the last publisher who was still complaining about it.
