EU opens antitrust probe into Google’s AI services

BRUSSELS | Xinhua |  The European Commission on Tuesday opened an antitrust investigation into whether U.S. tech giant Google has breached European Union (EU) anticompetitive rules, despite opposition from Washington.

The probe focuses on whether Google has used content from web publishers and from its video-sharing platform YouTube for artificial intelligence (AI) purposes on unfair terms, the commission said in a press release.

The case will look into Google’s use of web publishers’ content to provide its generative AI-powered services without appropriate compensation and without giving publishers a genuine possibility to refuse such use without risking a loss of traffic from Google Search.

It will also examine whether Google has used videos and other content uploaded to YouTube to train its generative AI models without compensating creators or allowing them to refuse such use, while rival AI developers are prevented from using YouTube content to train their own models.

The commission said it will now carry out its in-depth investigation as a priority.

In September, the EU fined Google 2.95 billion euros (about 3.34 billion U.S. dollars) for antitrust violations in the online advertising sector. In November, it launched an investigation into a potential breach of the Digital Markets Act by Google over the demotion of media publishers’ content in search results.

The tech giant is among the U.S. tech companies under heavy scrutiny from the European Commission in recent times. The commission last week opened a formal antitrust investigation into Meta and imposed fines totaling 120 million euros (139.8 million dollars) on Elon Musk’s social media platform X in its first non-compliance decision under the Digital Services Act.

The United States has repeatedly criticized the EU’s regulatory measures as being targeted at American companies. Musk blasted the EU on Saturday for the fine slapped on X, warning that his response would aim at the officials responsible for the penalty. ■