This Tuesday, the 9th, the European Commission opened an investigation into the technology giant Google on suspicion of violating European Union (EU) law, which prohibits abuse of a dominant position, by imposing “unfair conditions” on artificial intelligence (AI) content.
“The European Commission has opened a formal competition investigation to assess whether Google violated EU rules by using content from web publishers, as well as content uploaded to the video sharing platform YouTube, for artificial intelligence purposes,” the institution said in a statement.
According to Brussels, “the investigation will analyze, in particular, whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair conditions on publishers and content creators or by granting itself privileged access to that content, thus putting developers of competing AI models at a disadvantage.”
Brussels specifically suspects that Google may have used content to provide services powered by generative AI on its search results pages without adequate compensation, as well as videos and other content uploaded to YouTube to train Google’s generative AI models without the ability for creators to opt out of such use.
If confirmed, these practices could violate EU competition rules prohibiting the abuse of a dominant position.
The community executive will now carry out this in-depth investigation as a priority, without a deadline being set for its completion.
Technology giant Google is based in the United States and specializes in internet-related services and products, including online advertising, search, cloud computing, software, hardware and AI technologies.
The investigation comes at a time of tension between Brussels and Washington regarding technology multinationals, after the European Commission fined X 120 million euros and the North American administration spoke of an attack on the United States.