https://www.linkedin.com/posts/thomas-höppner-7ba59a70_competitionmatters-dma-googlenoncompliance-activity-7310584494992871424-zSj-?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_ios&rcm=ACoAAAdihRIBrZUyg2g1UXvoi9y0IkwJRHdXefM

Breaking Things: Google’s AI Overviews Hit Europe In an attempt to counter the disruptive force of plagiarism machines like Perplexity.AI, this week Google rolled out its traffic-killer AI Overviews in nine European countries, including Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and Switzerland. From a legal perspective, this is a bold move, especially just one week after the EU Commission's Preliminary Finding on self-preferencing in online search. https://lnkd.in/euqKR97c They found that displaying rich content, such as “financial and sport results,” directly on search result pages (SERP) constitutes a distinct service from Google Search, which violates Article 6(5) DMA unless providers of similar content are given an equivalent opportunity to appear as prominently. As I outlined here https://lnkd.in/e-aYz4_q (pages 61 et seq.), akin to vertical search services and (direct) content providers, AI-answer services serve a different purpose than online search services. To avoid favouring Google’s AI service (Gemini) in Google Search, the gatekeeper would need to grant providers of similar services an equivalent opportunity to appear. Since this is not happening, it’s hard to see how AI Overviews can comply with the DMA (and Art. 102 TFEU). Google is trying to avoid a wave of litigation by excluding AI Overviews for news content (for now). However, as I explained in my article, “On the Antitrust Implications of Embedding Generative AI in Core Platform Services” (https://lnkd.in/er6q8WWz), it’s not just news publishers but any website dependent on traffic that will suffer if their content is reused without consent by Google to satisfy information demand directly on Google’s SERP, rather than guiding users to the most relevant sources. It’s time to recalibrate the balance between online search and web publishers. If editorial content on the Open Web dries up, consumers will increasingly face the dire choice between paywalls or AI hallucinations, something an information society should not aim for. #CompetitionMatters #DMA #GoogleNonCompliance

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