Report from Ars Technica
In Brief – The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), under its Digital Markets Competition and Consumers Act (DMCC) authority to regulate the most dominant online platforms, has ordered Google to make changes to its AI-powered search features to provide clearer attribution and direct links to publisher content in AI-generated search results and offer publishers an effective opt-out AI search without any ranking penalties in traditional search. The new rules will allow publishers to prevent their content from being used to train or ground Google’s AI systems also without penalty in Google search. While Google argued that excessive attribution requirements in AI-search results could reduce usability and may reduce clicks to publishers, and that page-level opt-out controls for publishers would be burdensome to its search business, the company says that they will comply with the rules and are testing new Search Console controls for UK publishers. Industry groups welcomed the decision as a step toward fairer compensation and treatment of premium content.
Context – The chatbot-search convergence is well underway, and it was always going to be a bumpy ride, especially for Google, the dominant search provider in nearly every major market. Linking search results to Google’s ability to access data has raised hackles from publishers everywhere. AI chatbot competitors had to be complaining to regulators too. Chatbot competitors will soon be getting access to Google search data in the EU through a Digital Markets Act (DMA) “specification proceeding” that will direct the search giant to set up a data sharing regime, and in the US, it is part of the Google Search antitrust remedy. In the EU, the Commission has initiated an antitrust investigation, rather than a DMA proceeding, covering basically the same publisher objections that resulted in the new CMA’s rules. We would not be surprise to see the EU Commission impose “interim measures” on Google requiring them to basically extend their CMA agreement to EU publishers as their antitrust investigation proceeds, while Google must hope the agreement satisfies both sets of regulators.