Google’s various AI tools have been proving their worth as of late, but a common criticism is how Google has built these tools by scraping the work of publishers and creators across the web without explicit permission or compensation, and now the EU is launching an investigation into the matter.
The European Commission this week announced that it has opened a “formal antitrust investigation” into how Google has built its AI tools, namely around how Google may or may not have given itself “privileged access” to online content that its AI rivals lack, and also around how Google’s scraping of the web has affected publishers and creators.
There are two key things the EU is looking at here in terms of how Google’s actions affect content on the web, including how Google has used the content of web publishers, as well as videos uploaded to YouTube. For the former, the announcement mentions how Google does not allow publishers to opt out of having their content used in Google’s AI search tools without opting out of Google Search entirely – a death knell to any website. As for YouTube, the EU similarly seems to take issue with creators not being able to opt out of their videos being used for AI training without wider impacts.
The Commission explains:
- The content of web publishers to provide generative AI-powered services (‘AI Overviews’ and ‘AI Mode’) on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. AI Overviews shows AI-generated summaries responsive to a user’s search query above organic results, while AI Mode is a search tab similar to a chatbot answering users’ queries in a conversational style. 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. Indeed, many publishers depend on Google Search for user traffic, and they do not want to risk losing access to it.
- Video and other content uploaded on YouTube to train Google’s generative AI models without appropriate compensation to creators and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. Content creators uploading videos on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, including for training generative AI models. Google does not remunerate YouTube content creators for their content, nor does allow them to upload their content on YouTube without allowing Google to use such data. At the same time, rival developers of AI models are barred by YouTube policies from using YouTube content to train their own AI models.
It’s unclear what the outcome may be here, but it’s noted that if Google is found to be “distorting competition” through its actions, that it “may breach EU competition rules that prohibit the abuse of a dominant position.”
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