Report from CNBC
In Brief – The European Commission has announced an antitrust investigation into whether Google unfairly uses the content of online publishers to provide AI answers to search queries without appropriate compensation to publishers, and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. The regulator is also questioning Google’s use of content uploaded to YouTube to train its AI models without compensating video creators or offering them the possibility to refuse the use of their content. The investigation responds to widespread complaints from online publishers and media companies in Europe and elsewhere who argue that Google’s rollout of generative AI content in search results has caused traffic and ad revenue to sites that created the original content to fall. Along with potential harm to publishers and content creators, the EU antitrust investigation will examine whether Google’s practices have given it an unfair advantage over rival AI developers.
Context – Changes to Google search have always generated complaints. AI Overviews is the latest example. Google claims that users like the new service and that, as expected, some websites gain traffic and others lose some. The company argues that better responses to users lead to more searches and more traffic overall, as well as pointing out that competing AI chatbots are being used like search. This AI chatbot-search convergence was a key point in the US Google Search antitrust trial. Publishers with ad-based revenue models might also consider that ads leader Google wants to integrate ads into AI services and might prove the most capable of the AI companies. This is the second new EU AI antitrust investigation following a probe of Meta’s policy blocking rivals’ chatbot sessions over WhatsApp. The new AI-related probes are traditional antitrust investigations rather than using the Digital Markets Act “gatekeeper” law. While Google Search and WhatsApp are dominant providers in their traditional markets, chatbot market shares in Europe show Chat-GPT at 83% and AI search company Perplexity second at 8%, while Google and Meta offerings are in the low single digits.