Brussels – The EU-Google tug-of-war continues. The European Commission has opened an investigation into alleged breaches of competition rules related to the use of online content for artificial intelligence purposes. The EU fears, Teresa Ribera, executive vice-president for Competitive Transition, explains in a nutshell, that the web giant “may have imposed unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, while placing rival AI models developers at a disadvantage, in breach of EU competition rules.”
https://www.eunews.it/2015/04/15/lue-accusa-google-abusa-della-sua-posizione-dominante/
Specifically, the Community Executive’s services are concerned that Google may have used content from web publishers to provide services based on generative artificial intelligence (“AI Overviews” and “AI Mode”) on its search results pages, without adequate compensation” to the publishers and “without offering” them the opportunity to refuse such use of their content. The Commission points out that Google may have abused its dominant position given that “many publishers depend on Google Search for user traffic and do not want to risk losing access to it.”
The EU executive also suspects that videos and other content uploaded to YouTube were used to train Google’s generative artificial intelligence models without adequate compensation for the creators and without offering them the opportunity to refuse such use of their content. Content creators uploading videos to YouTube are obliged to grant Google permission to use their data for various purposes, including training generative artificial intelligence models. According to the Commission’s services, Google does not remunerate YouTube content creators for their content, nor does it allow them to upload their content to YouTube without authorising Google to use that data.
The launch of this investigation comes three months after the almost three billion-euro maxi-fine for violations of advertising rules, and marks a new chapter in the ongoing confrontation between the EU and the US big-tech web.
English version by the Translation Service of Withub
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