The European Commission has opened an investigation into Google AI Overviews!
It was announced this week that the European Commission has begun a formal antitrust investigation into whether Google has breached EU competition rules through its use of AI Overviews.
This is a big win for Foxglove because we made a submission to the Commission in June asking them to do exactly that – and the wording of the terms of the investigation focuses on two specific areas we highlighted.
- Whether Google effectively stole the work of news publishers to generate AI Overviews “without appropriate compensation” – or for free, in other words.
- Whether the penalty for refusing to allow Google to steal their work would result in news publishers being thrown off Search, which with Google’s 90% market share, is effectively being removed from the internet.
This is a big step forward. We have published research repeatedly demonstrating the incredible harm AI Overview’s are doing to the clicks and traffic many news sites need to pay the bills.
Just last month, we published new research on the dire effect on the Brazilian news industry due to Google’s news-filching chatbot, as part of our submission to the competition regulator there.
We’ve put in similar submissions now to the European Commission competition regulator, to the German competition regulator, the Italian regulator, the South African regulator, the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority and offered to submit evidence to the US Department of Justice allowing them to bring a new case specifically against Google AI Overviews after Judge Mehta ruled them out of bounds in his decision on Google this year.
Now, finally, a major international competition regulator has stepped up to investigate Google’s wholesale theft of the news – a potentially existential threat to both the quality of reliable information online, and to the health of our democracies.
But, as our co-executive director Rosa Curling told the BBC, there’s still one big thing missing: investigations take time and time is one thing the press is rapidly running out of.
In order for there to still be an independent news industry left at all by the time Commission’s investigation is completed, it needs to make an urgent injunction that allows publishers to opt out of having their work stolen by Google and forcing the tech giant to allow them to remain in Search when they do so.
We have written to the Commission urging them to make the final step needed now, to protect the scene of the crime while it investigates Google’s grand news larceny – and we will be writing to every other regulator on our list to follow the Commission’s example in launching an investigation into the market harms of Google AI Overviews.
This is something we’ve been working towards for over a year. Antitrust isn’t often considered a sexy type of law and it doesn’t often hit the headlines, but it is one of the only real ways to truly break up Big Tech – by hitting them right in the monopoly.
To get all the updates on this work as they come, hit the button below: