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 is not letting competition concerns slide. The European Commission has launched an investigation into whether Google may have breached EU competition laws by using content from websites without compensating owners to generate answers for its AI summaries that appear above search results.
The investigation will also examine how AI summaries use videos from YouTube to generate answers. It will assess 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 stated it will investigate to what extent the generation of AI Overviews and AI Mode by Google is based on web publishers’ content without appropriate compensation, and without the possibility for publishers to refuse without losing access to Google Search.
Google’s AI Overview and AI Mode are the two chief products being investigated. The EC highlights that the tech giant leaves websites and content producers with little choice, as it directs a majority of web traffic, does not pay for using their content, and does not allow YouTube uploads if you do not let Google use that data.
The EU is also concerned that Google does not allow rival AI companies to use YouTube content to train their own AI models.
This investigation comes at a time when companies developing AI models and content are being sued for copyright infringement by publishers and websites. For example, the AI search tool Perplexity has been sued by several outlets, including the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, News Corp, New York Post, Merriam-Webster, Nikkei, and Reddit.
However, the EU’s investigation differs because in many of these lawsuits, media companies are suing as a way to negotiate content-licensing deals with AI firms. The EU is seeking to level the playing field for AI companies that compete with Google, which reportedly 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. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.