The CEO of People Inc., America’s largest publisher, has labeled Google an “intentional bad actor” for its data collection practices. He argued this forces publishers to let Google scrape their content for AI training, because blocking the crawler would also remove them from vital search results. Vogel said this tactic allows Google to “steal our content to compete with us,” escalating the high-stakes battle between media and AI developers. Google’s ‘Crawler Checkmate’ Leaves Publishers No ChoiceThe core of the accusation, detailed by Vogel at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, is Google’s unified crawler. If publishers block Google’s unified crawler to protect their intellectual property from being used for AI training, they are simultaneously de-indexed from Google Search.