Even as Big Tech and American tech elites criticize how the European Union is implementing rules to regulate tech and AI on the continent, the bloc isn’t letting competition concerns slide. The European Commission has launched an investigation into whether Google may have breached EU’s competition laws by using content from websites without compensating owners to generate answers for its AI summaries that appear above search results.
The EC also will look at how AI summaries use videos from YouTube to generate answers. The investigation will examine if Google is harming competition in the AI market by granting itself access to websites’ content, and imposing “unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators.”
“The Commission will investigate to what extent the generation of AI Overviews and AI Mode by Google is based on web publishers’ content without appropriate compensation for that, and without the possibility for publishers to refuse without losing access to Google Search,” the bloc’s executive arm wrote in a statement.
Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode are the two chief products being investigated here, and the EC highlights that the tech giant doesn’t leave websites or content producers with much choice since it directs a majority of web traffic, doesn’t pay them for using their content, and doesn’t allow YouTube uploads if you don’t let Google use that data.
The EU is also concerned over the fact that Google doesn’t allow rival AI companies to use YouTube content to train their own AI models.
“This complaint risks stifling innovation in a market that is more competitive than ever,” a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “Europeans deserve to benefit from the latest technologies and we will continue to work closely with the news and creative industries as they transition to the AI era.”
The investigation comes at a time when companies developing AI models and content are being sued for copyright infringement by publishers and websites. AI search tool Perplexity, for one, has been sued by several outlets, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, News Corp, New York Post, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, and Reddit.
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The EU’s investigation differs, however, because in many cases, these media companies are suing as a way to negotiate content-licensing deals with AI firms in hopes of compensating creators and being paid for their content. The EU is seeking to level the playing field for AI companies that compete with Google, which according to some reports, benefits from its reach by being able to train its AI models on much more of the internet than its rivals.
Under consistent and widespread criticism of its AI regulation, however, the EU is considering simplifying its AI rules, and has proposed to delay the implementation of rules for the use of AI in high-risk applications.
