In a landmark decision last week, Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (Cade) unanimously voted to open a formal administrative proceeding against Google to investigate whether the company is abusing its dominant position by using third-party journalistic content (known as “Google News case”), particularly in its Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems.
The proceeding will examine whether the automated collection of journalistic content and its direct display on Google’s results page, without adequate compensation to original producers, constitutes an “exploitative abuse of dominant position.” This practice has two dimensions: the older one, snippets — excerpts of text, titles and images displayed in search results without the user needing to click through to the source — and the more recent AI Overview, which goes further by delivering a synthetic response built from multiple sources directly to the user. For Commissioner Diogo Thomson, AI Overview is not a new practice but a more sophisticated version of the same appropriation logic: Google continues scraping third-party content, but now processes and synthesizes it in a way that further reduces the incentive to visit the original sources.
Google, however, does not merely retain user attention within its own results page. It monetizes that attention through an advertising ecosystem it controls end to end. In practice, journalistic content serves as a free input that increases the platform’s value to advertisers, while news outlets simultaneously lose the traffic and revenue that would have come with it. In the words of Commissioner Diogo Thomson, Google “is not a mere technical agent devoid of decision-making power”: it “occupies the position of an indispensable intermediary that decides who appears, in what format they appear, what volume of traffic they receive, and on what terms content produced by third parties will be utilised within its ecosystem.” This dimension had been ignored by Cade’s Superintendence-General in its decision to shelve the case in 2024.
With a market share above 90% in Brazil’s online search market, Google is one of the main gateways for the public to access information online, and news outlets depend on the platform to be found and monetized. The Commissioner’s opinion deepens this concern by pointing out that the company could reduce the visibility of outlets that do not authorize the use of their content for AI-generated summaries. “The central point, therefore, is not the existence of content use, but the absence of an economically viable alternative to refusing it without a substantial loss of visibility and access to the public.”
Although the case remains under analysis by Cade’s Superintendence-General, the plenary decision already represents an important milestone: it is one of the first occasions in which a competition authority treats generative AI as a factor of economic power and addresses it through existing competition law. To do so, Commissioner Diogo Thomson developed a structured test that examines the degree of outlets’ dependence on the platform, the nature of the conditions imposed, and the existence of concrete harm — a synthesis of international theories and case law adapted to digital markets. While other jurisdictions have relied on specific copyright laws or new platform regulations, Brazil has shown that existing competition tools may be sufficient to address the problem, with the potential to influence the international debate.
The role of Sleeping Giants Brasil and other civil society organizations in Cade’s decision
After the case was reopened by Commissioner Camila Cabral and civil society was invited into the proceedings by a ruling from Commissioner Diogo Thomson in 2025, Sleeping Giants Brasil (SGBR) contributed to the investigation by bringing a dimension that the Superintendence-General had overlooked: the structural role of digital advertising in the relationship between Google and news outlets. SGBR’s submission highlighted that the problem is not limited to the use of snippets or AI-generated summaries. It is rooted in an architecture in which Google dominates the entire chain: it is simultaneously the search engine that distributes traffic, the intermediary that sells ads displayed on news outlets’ websites, the platform that defines which metrics are visible, and the operating system running on 80% of Brazilian smartphones. This vertical integration creates a structural asymmetry that goes far beyond the competition for clicks.
Other civil society organizations also contributed to the investigation, each from their own area of expertise — consumer protection, journalism sustainability, press freedom, freedom of expression, digital rights, and economic rights: ARTIGO 19, Center for Technology and Society at Fundação Getulio Vargas (CTS-FGV), Foxglove, Brazilian Institute for Consumer Defense (Idec), Momentum – Journalism and Tech Task Force, Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism & Liberty, and Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
These organizations systematically brought to Cade’s attention concerns about the use of generative AI that the Superintendence-General had set aside. When the case was shelved in 2024, the conduct under investigation covered only the scraping of journalistic content to boost Google’s own thematic search tools, and the decision made no mention of AI Overview or its effects on outlets’ traffic and revenue. It was Commissioner Diogo Thomson who, upon requesting a review of the case, identified the need to deepen the inquiry in light of these recent developments — and civil society contributions were central to informing that analysis. The Commissioner himself acknowledged this in his opinion:
“[…] the participation of civil society organisations, research centres, professional associations and organisations dedicated to the defence of collective rights allows, in this context, not only to expand the range of information available to the authority, but also to shed light on dimensions of the competition problem that sometimes escape an analysis overly centred on the economic agents directly involved.”2
The Google News case is an example of what Brazilian civil society has been able to accomplish in this field, but it is far from the only one. In recent years, SGBR and other organizations have built, with limited resources and in a field historically distant from civil society — antitrust — and amid the growing technical complexity of digital markets, a meaningful capacity to intervene in the country’s most important regulatory and competition debates. In 2024, SGBR participated in the Ministry of Finance’s Public Input Process No. 01/2024 on digital market regulation and in the Attorney General’s Office public hearing on content moderation in digital platforms, alongside organizations such as ARTIGO 19, Idec, and Coalizão Direitos na Rede. The following year, SGBR presented oral contributions at an unprecedented Cade public hearing on the competitive aspects of mobile digital ecosystems, focusing on the anticompetitive effects of Google’s dominance in digital advertising. Also participating were Coalizão Direitos na Rede, DiraCom, ARTIGO 19, Proteste, Euroconsumers Brasil, Idec, and Data Privacy Brasil, each contributing from their own expertise in human rights, consumer protection, and data privacy.
This consistent presence reflects a civil society that has developed a reliable compass for identifying relevant competition concerns. In 2024, Idec filed a complaint with Cade against Meta for abuse of dominant position in the generative AI market. The case was shelved at the time, but in 2025 Cade issued a preventive measure against Meta on the same issue, following a complaint by smaller market players. Some of the concerns that underpinned that decision — such as self-preferencing — had already been raised by Idec a year earlier.
Such engagement matters especially now. Cade has historically adopted a cautious stance in digital markets, concerned that premature intervention could cause irreversible harm, and to date has not secured a single conviction of a big tech company for anticompetitive conduct. At the same time, there is a real window of opportunity: cases involving operating systems, online advertising, and the elimination of potential competitors in AI are pending judgment, and Congress is currently considering Bill No. 4,675/2025, which proposes a specific regulatory framework for large digital platforms. Brazil also plays a reference role among Global South countries, making this jurisdiction strategically important for shaping how the developing world responds to the power of big tech.
In this landscape, civil society is not a supporting actor. It is one of the few forces capable of bringing independent technical expertise to an authority still building its tools for digital markets — and the Google News case showed that it makes a difference.
