The European Commission has launched an investigation to uncover whether Google has breached competition rules by using other publishers’ YouTube content for AI purposes. The EU is examining the terms and conditions that Google has imposed on content creators after the search engine’s web scraping resulted in huge traffic hits to online content publishers. Teresa
The European Commission has launched an investigation to uncover whether Google has breached competition rules by using other publishers’ YouTube content for AI purposes.
The EU is examining the terms and conditions that Google has imposed on content creators after the search engine’s web scraping resulted in huge traffic hits to online content publishers.
Teresa Ribera, European Commission Executive Vice President for Clean, Just, and Competitive Transition, said:
“AI is bringing remarkable innovation and many benefits for people and businesses across Europe, but this progress cannot come at the expense of the principles at the heart of our societies. This is why we are investigating whether Google may have imposed unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators while placing rival AI model developers at a disadvantage, in breach of EU competition rules.”
The Commission stated Google may have used AI overviews without proper compensation to publishers and content creators, but many publishers depend on Google search for web traffic and wouldn’t want to lose access to that.
If the breach is proven, it will be ruled that Google violated EU competition laws that prohibit the abuse of a dominant position.
This could potentially be advantageous for affiliates who have suffered from traffic declines because of AI models.