Alphabet (GOOGL) stock traded at about $345 on Monday morning, October 5, up 0.4% at 10:28 a.m. EDT, as Poland’s competition watchdog charged Google with possibly abusing its dominant position in content-payment talks with Polish publishers. That came four days after a US judge threw out two lawsuits over Google’s AI Overviews.
Google won in Washington
On October 1, US District Judge Amit Mehta dismissed suits from Chegg and Rolling Stone publisher Penske Media. Both claimed Google broke antitrust law by forcing publishers to accept AI summaries of their content if they wanted to stay in search results. Mehta said the claims “fail to get out of the starting gate.”
His reasoning was blunt: “an expectation is not an agreement. It is simply how a general search engine works.” He added that antitrust law is no substitute for lawmakers when innovation causes economic harm.
Europe is pushing the other way
Poland’s UOKiK says Google proposed payments without giving publishers the data they needed to assess the rates. “Big tech companies cannot place themselves above the law,” UOKiK President Tomasz Chrostny said. The maximum fine is 10% of turnover, and the case sits alongside a separate European Commission probe, opened in December 2025, into Google’s use of publisher content in its AI services. Google did not immediately respond to Reuters.
Related publisher disputes, but different legal questions: the US court dismissed specific antitrust claims, while European regulators are still investigating Google’s conduct.
GOOGL valuation model: watch the margin
I ran TIKR’s model on market consensus: revenue growing 16.6% a year, a net income margin of 32.7%, EPS growth of 16.2% a year, and the P/E easing 2.6% a year. Growth sits close to last year’s 15.1%. The margin steps up from 28.6%, while EPS growth drops to less than half of last year’s 34.5%. I left consensus alone because Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said on Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference September 8 that Google is winning new customers “roughly twice as fast as a year ago.”
The model lands at $679 by December 31, 2030. That is a 97.8% total return from $343.50 over 4.2 years, or 17.4% a year. Put simply, the stock roughly doubles.
So the margin is the number to watch. Mehta’s ruling removes these two antitrust claims, but does not establish that Google will avoid US publisher payments. European investigations could create additional costs, although their outcomes and any effect on the model’s 32.7% margin remain uncertain.
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
