AI Overviews has been zapping people’s traffic. Now, Europe is initiating an antitrust investigation against Google in response.
Following the deployment of Google AI Overview, the open web started experiencing a rapid decline as traffic started drying up. Don’t take our word for it, though, Google themselves said precisely this in court documents – comments they would later walk back from when they realized that such comments would backfire on them in debates outside of the court fight they were involved in.
While Google’s admission was unusually frank about the state of the internet, you really didn’t need Google to straight up confirm what is already happening. When this whole AI Overview thing started, I pretty much was among the first to raise the alarm over this. All you really needed was a novice level of understanding of how SEO works. By having AI summaries shoved at the users right at the top of the results, pushing the ads down, and burying the actual web results at the end, the prospect of pulling in traffic became substantially more bleak for independent websites.
At first, the mainstream media completely ignored these developments despite it representing an existential threat to their online presence. After about a year, though, the pain of a massive drop in web traffic became impossible to ignore and they finally realized what was happening. True to form of their usual style of exhausting every wrong option before being forced to move in the correct direction, they made the second wrong move. After ignoring the problem and hoping it goes away on its own, they opted to perform another swing and a miss and try suing for copyright infringement.
Utilizing copyright was a dead on arrival method of dealing with AI Overview. Anyone with a basic level of how copyright law and fair use/fair dealing works can tell you that summarizing content does not constitute copyright infringement. No matter how many times you try to argue that it’s because a computer is doing it doesn’t really change that since “unless a computer does it” doesn’t exist in current copyright law.
It wasn’t until this year that publishers started to finally realize that antitrust is a much better tool for this. After all, if a companies actions is having an adverse affect on an entire market, antitrust litigation and challenges is a much better fit. Simply put, the situation is that Google is utilizing its monopoly-like power over the web to basically ransom publishers status as a site that can be indexed and force them to feed Google’s AI or risk a huge chunk of their traffic by opting out of Google’s ecosystem entirely. Does that sound like market abuse? It does to me. Does that sound like unjust enrichment? Sounds like it as far as I can tell.
Earlier this year, the owners of Rolling Stone launched a court challenge against Google over AI Overview. Publishers in Europe, separately, filed a complaint against Google with European regulators for antitrust violations. At a time when Google has become gradually more aggressive with their AI only search results, these challenges finally making an appearance is definitely a relief to me. Someone finally figured it all out at least.
Recently, we learned that, with respect to the complaint in Europe, it appears that European regulators are moving the complaint forward by launching a full blown investigation into Google. From PC Gamer:
The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into Google and whether it is imposing unfair terms on content creators and web publishers to power its AI services.
The Commission’s investigation focuses on two major concerns. First, the possible use of videos uploaded to YouTube being used to train generative AI models. This being done without the content creator receiving any money or being able to refuse to have their content used this way.
“Content creators uploading videos on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, including for training generative AI models,” the Commission says. “Google does not remunerate YouTube content creators for their content, nor does allow them to upload their content on YouTube without allowing Google to use such data.”
Secondly, the use of web publishers’ content (i.e. webpages) to provide AI Overviews and AI Mode.
“The Commission will investigate to what extent the generation of AI Overviews and AI Mode by Google is based on web publishers’ content without appropriate compensation for that, and without the possibility for publishers to refuse without losing access to Google Search.”
If anything, this sounds like European regulators at least finds enough merit to the original complaint to move forward with an investigation. I’m not personally familiar with what sort of threshold has to be met for them to do so, but that threshold was definitely met at least. So, it’ll be interesting to see how far this complaint goes. After all, it is the open web that is so clearly suffering under the decisions being made by Google over the last few years.
Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.
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