It has nothing to do with monopolies. Google was protected from defamation law with search because the page title and snippets were direct quotes from the linked result page. Whereas with AI overviews, the copy is written by a Google-controlled LLM.
Three stars review is taken down for "libel": https://support.google.com/maps/thread/367778263/google-maps...
HNer gets a legal threat after saying that he didn't like a doctor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44734895
Google maps german policy: https://support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/1699727...
Meanwhile, service in Germany is still rather poor (especially if you have children), but at least no one can complain!
This post is written by an LLM, and possibly a complete fabrication.
But can confirm from personal experience that businesses threaten to sue based on Google Maps reviews.
You can even find many articles from specialized lawyers if you search in German: https://www.prinz.law/bewertungen/klage-zugestellt-wegen-neg...
https://rmx.news/article/germany-chancellor-merz-quietly-fil...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/may/19/boris-johns...
https://www.thelocal.de/20260504/how-a-google-maps-update-ex...
Its where the DRM bypass software lives these days, along with Bypass Paywalls Clean.
For the plebes, it is a civil tort.
For the AI companies, its required for "training". Rules dont apply to too-large-to-fail professional for-profit pirates.
But damn you if you try to make a Netflix-clone with every video. Wew.
If Google started to show how many reviews were removed, it was because the lawfare started to seriously affect the ratings.
When you see the pattern, best to stopped arguing with such users as their goal is not an honest debate, their goal is just to 'DDoS' you with their opinion.
§ 7 UWG Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb
My guess is that often reviews are generalizing (easy mistake to make). E.g. they say "service is slow", when they should say: "When I was there on Thursday at noon service was slow for my table".
Who dictates the "should”?
The German law simply removes the need to assume anything.
As an European, this attitude is absolutely fucking shocking.
Police force their way into my home without excellent cause to do so? I'd want someone executed. It would be unforgivable.
It has nothing to do with the guns, but with the absolutely gross violation of the most basic rights codified by the ECHR.
>This would be more about privacy violations and unnecessary chicanery.
Which is actually worse than the typical American shooting. US cops do not typically go to the scene planning to murder someone, in this case the German cops very much knowingly went to harass someone for calling the German interior minister a prick. It is absolutely egregious premeditated harassment.
German minister of interior, the guy in charge of the police, sending the cops to harass people for calling him a prick. Even the current US admin is not so thin-skinned.
So maybe Americans should worry about their own business and not tell a country with a much longer history what is best for them?
Idk what exactly happend. But somehow they got approval from court to collect evidence of the crime (electronic devices) via house search. As said, the harm caused by the house search was later deemed unproportional to the crime.
According to[0] the (aptly named) Lawfare Institute:
Since the term “lawfare” is controversial in some circles, and subject to a
variety of interpretations and uses, a bit more explanation about our
understanding of the concept is in order. Going back to the 1950s, the term
has frequently been used in contexts wholly unrelated to national security,
ranging from divorce law to courtroom advocacy to colonialism to airfare for
lawyers.
You just have to link the review and they will send Google a legal document to delete it.
Make one big enough, and you’ll even have people trying to play it crooked by pretending to play it straight.
Anyway, Germany is probably one of the few places where this happens. The issue isn't necessarily that reviews can be challenged. The issue is that users aren't informed when they leave a review that they may later be required to provide proof of their visit.
I once left a negative review of a very popular touristy business in Germany after a genuinely terrible experience. I included photos and detailed information, yet they still challenged the review, claiming I had never been a customer. Google then required me to provide additional evidence to prove that I had actually visited the place.
What made it even more frustrating is that they challenged the review two years in a row. After the second challenge, I wrote to them that if they continued contesting the review, I would consider it harassment and pursue legal action. After that, they stopped.
What I find pretty shady is that most businesses seem to wait a year or two before contesting reviews. By that point, most people no longer have receipts, invoices, or other documentation. If they challenged reviews immediately, customers would be much more likely to still have that evidence available. In my case, I take photos frequently, so Google accepted my proof and kept the review online.
Ironically, after going through this process myself, I've come to believe that some form of verification should probably be standard worldwide. Requiring reviewers to provide evidence that they were actually customers could help reduce fake reviews. But if that's going to be the standard, it should be clearly communicated upfront, before people submit their reviews.
Another related issue I have with Google Maps is that, at least in my home country, some places have reviews disabled because Google considers them too prone to polarization or controversy. Schools are one example.
Personally, I think that's a terrible idea. I'd rather be able to read the reviews and make up my own mind. Instead, Google, in its infinite wisdom, decides that certain topics are too contentious for users to see feedback at all.
I find that to be one of the worst decisions made by the Google Maps team. Hiding reviews doesn't eliminate disagreement or bias, it just removes information that users could otherwise evaluate for themselves.
Truthful statement seem to be a defense for Germany, though. https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/englisch_stgb/englisch_st...
> Section 192
> Insult despite proof of the truth
> Proof of the truth of the asserted or disseminated fact does not preclude punishment in accordance with section 185 if the insult results from the form of the assertion or dissemination or the circumstances under which it was made.
Making a claim of 3 star service, without providing 3 star service evidence, isn't any different than a claim like they don't clean the dishes enough. Sure, you didn't write out the exact words, but by submitting the review, you still submitted such a claim, and so it remains a question of if you provided evidence to prove it, which gets into how deep the legal system wants the evidence verified (is a picture enough, or do you need to provide evidence the picture is of the store at the date and time relevant to your review).
Is that defamation? That isn't a statement of fact, that's just relaying what you heard.
If I relay what the Daily Mail says, am I also guilty of defamation, or can I rely on what others say?
Google does not get routinely sued.
Yes, Lawyers send takedown requests to Google.
Google sends the reviewer a message and ask for a statement. If you provide one. They will check it and decide whether they seem it defamation or not.
However, Google doesn't verify shit. Even if you send them proof of a purchase or visit and your message is objectively a opinion (not defamation) they will take it down. Why? I assume because they really don't care about individual reviews and rather spare the time and money and just take the comment down.
Google changing their review displays is Google's decision. It has NOTHING to do with any threat of being sued.
They could actually leave the review up when it's not defamatory but they simply don't want to invest the time to validate it or risk leaving a potentially defamatory review online.
And the legal threat is without proof, so why would you even bring it up. OP could have simply posted the letter. They didn't wich makes this completely unprovable
(I just wrote an extensive analysis about that https://nickyreinert.de/2026/2026-05-28-google-maps-reviews/
It is relevant for Google though, because they want to transfer it to another product.
And the court is saying that whatever that new product is, Google is not allowed to mislead the public by pretending it is search.
In my view, the ruling could mean that Gemini's output is legally seen as first-person speech by Google regardless of where it is published.
When I wrote "Gemini is not illegal" it would have been more correct to say that the court has not decided about Gemini but specifically about search.
And I do think it makes sense to distinguish between explicitly chatting with an LLM and entering something in the search bar people have used for decades now.
I'm just wondering whether the logic of the ruling is tied to the specific context (search results) or applied more generally to LLM generated text.
To me it seems pretty reasonable that content Google generates with Gemini and publishes on their own google.com domain is their speech. Or at least they are fully editorially responsible.
The problem here is that
1) the AI Overview is giving incorrect information, and
2) it is Google's own words
...which makes Google liable for anything false there.
They weren't liable for false statements in search results, because that was 100% other people's content, being linked to, with a small blurb taken directly from their words. With the AI Overviews, regardless of whether it's getting its information from other people's content, it's remixing it based on Gemini's algorithms and synthesising statements that are frequently wrong.
search engine -> search terms -> search command
Google accepted the argument up to that point. Then they argued that they are not responsible for the search result. The court argued that what they did was not a search (or not protected the way a search is).
The argument whether Gemini, ChatGPT or Claude are search engines and whether a prompt is search terms is a different argument. Certainly an interesting one, but not what that court looked at.
It's not just about the output, the input matters also.
If ai output is not copyrightable, it should not be considered personal output. So nobody should be responsible for it. Or if it is considered personal output, it should be copyrightable. Or perhaps the ai companies will be liable for all output, and they will therefore all cease to exist in any useful form? This seems like another alternative, where the output legal value is not central, but there will be a thousand different fights about how it is presented to others.
It's perfectly legally consistent to say that AI-generated content has no copyright (because it's the product of a computer, not a human), and also that the human or organization operating an AI is legally responsible for anything in its output that is legally actionable.
Someone needs to hold legal responsibility for any piece of content out there. You can't just wrap your decisions in AI and get to be free of all liability for it.
But copyright isn't like that. There's nothing lost to society by saying that content is not copyrightable, and particularly given how the major LLMs were trained, there's a lot lost to society by saying that they can take all of that from everyone without consent, and then everything it produces has copyright and can be used for, say, Google's profit in perpetuity.
So I think I like the current decision which is more about presentation, dissemination, application, and claims than content, and there should of course be liability for LLM creators if they are not actively dealing with results like CP, violence, or many other illegal or dangerous things.
But if Google accurately summarizes the defamatory page, then the summary is defamatory?
The whole point is that these particular defamatory claims weren't made by some third-party, but hallucinated entirely by Google's own AI.
There is no "accurate summary". Just a pack of lies fabricated in-house at Google.