EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results
bbc.com
bbc.com
Alternately, will you start using royalties in perpetuity whenever you talk about some event, because you read an article or a book about that topic once and included something you learned in that article?
Basically everything you know, that is even somewhat recent is based on others’ content, do you track and cite every single thing you’ve ever read and send them royalties with every conversation?
I’m not trying to defend these big corporations, but for me this is a fundamental question we need to be asking.
As consequential as it will be, for me, the answer is that as long as you paid the cost of accessing the content (be it free or a subscription price) while collecting the information that is used to fundamentally transform the information in ways that seem to fall under fair use, then you cannot expect rights, short of full copy/paste plagiarism.
Genuine question, how are you able to do that? Searching by exact matches with some portions of the AI suggested "response"? Some other method?
I'm not convinced that Google understands the limitations, to be honest. The most charitable interpretation I can give of their motivations is that they're terrified of competition from OpenAI, and are trying to present an alternative. Unfortunately, they're presenting a woefully inadequate product.
It goes further though, into legitimate questions of copyright, which the tech industry has always fought against. (Take first, deal with it later is the MO.)
They might as well just ban all non-EU tech at this point.
While the EU wastes their time with things like this, they fall further and further behind the curve, still wondering why no one wants to start a business there.
(though we too have that in Europe in the form of high taxes, so that a rich few politicians benefit)
Because while this is true for tech companies, you must consider where that money comes from and how much (more) human suffering goes into it. I'd rather live in society where I make a decent living and people aren't (as) exploited.
edit, to add: I'm exaggerating to make my point clearer, but in these discussions I always get the distinct feeling that if the US still had slavery, American farmers would be making snide remarks about how uncompetitive and anti-business the EU is with all of our pesky regulations.
Meanwhile a vocal minority of European farmers would be pointing at the US, complaining about how much less money they make than American farmers, and pressuring our representatives to legalize slavery because otherwise we're all going to get left behind. In other words it all feels a bit absurd when nobody is considering the negative externalities of these policies.
This was in the context of innovation (or lack thereof), and this being a tech-website then, yes, I'm mostly talking about tech workers. One cannot have (tech) innovation while getting paid 5 to 10 times less (and in many cases I'm being generous to the European employers here) compared to what's happening across the ocean. That's why SAP is still a big thing in Germany and that's why Tesla (and then the Chinese) were able to eat Germany's car-software lunch.
E.g. Germany, the largest EU economy, is very dependent on their car export industry. Guess which industry isn't too hot right now? Do you think you salary will survive the EU losing their export markets? Mine surely will not.
Yet every time the EU tries to enforce regulations so that technological competition becomes actually possible everyone is mad about it.
Tell me another country that competes with the US on monopolistic tech platforms? The only one I know of is China, and that's because their GFW and regulations essentially prevented US platforms from taking hold to begin with, and their stronghold on tech manufacturing means they actually have teeth when it comes to securing concessions from Western techbros (where as the EU couldn't even be bothered to enforce the GDPR).
Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.
Access to VCs and funding is easier in the US. Heck, even if you try to build your own startup, with your own funds, when you're out there looking for investments soon enough being "delaware incorporated" will become a requirement.
What I can tell you from my experience in seeking out venture/angel/seed funding opportunities in the EU is that many (most) that turn up on search results don't have a "pitch us" form and more of a "we'll find you if we want to fund you". There are also incubators, a la YCombinator, that provide only mentorship and no funding (ie. I would need to quit my job and sustain myself to build a startup).
It's not required to compete. It's just their style and old fashioned. A 1 point hitting kids was the way to go. We all know how that went. The world has changed. Those kingdom eras no longer exist. The EU should bring out real substance.
The EU has been regulating the US tech for over a decade. In that time the EU has only fallen further behind.
Meanwhile China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US, while the EU is loosing the one large industry which it has left, manufacturing, to China.
This whole thing is pathetic. Of the goal of the EC ever was the creation of a competitive EU software industry it was a total failure and it was bound to be a total failure. Because what they did were idiotic regulations.
Everything the regulations have accomplished is that trying to compete in the EU puts such an enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed.
China is in this position because of regulations (and technological enforcement of them like GFW), which prevented US tech from taking any significant foothold and left the market available for local competition.
> enormous legal burden on any prospective competitor that failure is guaranteed
Can you tell me which business can't work in the EU? Selling software is legal. Operating a SaaS is legal. Hell, even industrial-scale spyware is legal, as long as you become big quickly enough so that enforcing the GDPR against you becomes counterproductive. The only thing I see that can't be done is industrial-scale corporation-on-consumer fraud, but I don't think we're losing much because of that.
Then the regulations of the EC just fucking sucked and destroyed all chances of the EU ever having a competitive software industry.
Those business-ending GDPR fines HN loves fear-mongering about never materialized. Similarly with the DMA - Apple is still being allowed to stall and wage bureaucratic warfare to not comply.
In contrast, when in China people were found to be using AirDrop's "open to everyone" feature to share content the CCP deemed inappropriate, we quickly got a change where AirDrop would only stay open to everyone for 10 mins before reverting back to "contacts only".
If the EU had the same balls they would give Apple an ultimatum and you'd get alternate browser engines, app stores, and the right to "sideload" overnight.
Who cares about AI. The EU is loosing on everything.
I wish the US would call their bluff and avenge those bullshit fines sevenfold with tariffs.
People can and will do many things at once, like actually pursuing monopoly issues AND trying to improve the situation for everyone else. Its almost like there is only limited amount of one thing: space on page 1 of media outlets.
The EU is a big place with a lot going on. You will persuade more people and learn more if you engage in a more open style.
Large US tech companies like to pretend like they are being harassed by regulation, but in the end they behave as if they were regular business expenses. Do shady things now, get fined X years later.
Sounds like an invite for no 1 to operate. The rules just keep growing faster than the AI bubble.
No they aren't.
What you have, and of interest to digital companies are.
GDPR (2016), for all operating in the EU. You get the gist of it in an afternoon.
The AI guideline (2024), also readable in an afternoon, and it mostly has provision that make life harder for those in law enforcement, and healthcare tech.
DMA (2022), only affects the select few at the top Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.
Show me where these bubbling "inscrutable" regulations, that push business away, are.
Edit: Found it. The data stem from a really radical paper that wants the US government to sanction Europe immediately and harshly [0]. Some guy called David Fant made the graph, presumably using data from said paper. The whole thing was then published on reddit [1] , Instagram and Twitter with a incidentiery headline. So yeah, in terms of credibility this thing falls flat.
[0] https://itif.org/publications/2025/12/01/defending-american-...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/XGramatikInsights/comments/1pi28x8/...
Like investigations into Apple, X and others...
I don't want my Kagi quick answers, Summarize page, or Ask questions about page buttons to be turned off, I find them extremely useful.
On the other hand, the complainer mentioned is the Daily Mail.
I'd much rather see a non specific ruling over whether or not summarizing already short articles is copyright infringement - regardless of who's doing it. Copyright litigation and legislation tends to favor the richer party no matter where it happens.
Newspapers are notorious for lifting stories and photos from social media. They rarely bother to compensate the original creator either.
Perhaps a better approach is to make sure that the AI summaries are just as liable for libel actions, and regulator mandatory corrections, as the newspapers.
Is libel in AI generated summaries a problem?
Also, it seems you are fundamentally missing how AI is different. What would you expect a “regulator mandatory correction” to look like, a one sentence summary comes with a notice that it was corrected at some point?
AI is also going to make regulators and bureaucrats totally superfluous if done properly, where AI simply “regulates” based on laws written in a clear text and open weight manner.
Clearly, given there have been cases about it already.
> Also, it seems you are fundamentally missing how AI is different. What would you expect a “regulator mandatory correction” to look like, a one sentence summary comes with a notice that it was corrected at some point?
Laws shouldn't care about mechanisms, they should care about outcomes. We can't allow ourselves to say "this tech makes ${legal obligation XYZ} impossible to perform, let us deploy it anyway": either you figure out how to solve for ${XYZ} or you don't get to deploy it.
> AI is also going to make regulators and bureaucrats totally superfluous if done properly, where AI simply “regulates” based on laws written in a clear text and open weight manner.
"If" is doing heavy lifting there — "if done properly", AI makes all human labour redundant. Nobody knows how far away "done properly" is.
We've had ~20+ years to come up with something better than copyright with nothing to show for. First it was the plebs ignoring copyrights, then it was the search engines and social networks and their knowledge graphs and now it's the billionaires and their AI companies that hoover up the web.
Somewhat more difficult to run a business when EU commissioners keep making up fines to steal your revenue.
This law was not put on display in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard" in a basement with neither working stairs nor light, what they're being investigated for is something that Google has already fallen foul of with its search engines in multiple nations worldwide.
People need to understand that U.S. "tech" is barely considered tech in the EU as far as social media platforms and search engines go. You could cut off the Magnificent 7 completely and the EU would switch to new data sources and operating systems within a month.
U.S. "tech" is mostly entertainment, and the EU has also been behind Hollywood for the mass market movies for a long time.
I can't begin to understand the level of delusion you have reached. You truly are fish unaware of the water you are in.
The pure ignorance the europeans have on their tech reliance on US tech is astounding.
> Also Without iOS or Android play store, you're back using Nokia or Chinese counterpart.
Yes, and? It's not like Chinese OSes (forks of Android or whatever) are noteworthy for being bad.
More generally, even just having the option to switch is important for purchasers in general, so that the vendors know they don't have a captive audience and don't try all the usual stuff that makes monopolies bad.
Clearly you mean something very different by the word "stable" than any use I have ever encountered before. Also, one word to offend Trump or Musk seems to lead to more problems right it now — in normal times, saying that "China's at least willing to agree to disagree about human rights" would be faint praise indeed, but compare that to Trump and Musk where saying "cis" on Twitter is considered "hate speech", where being a journalist and asking Trump about something he himself said on camera the week before will have him rant at you, where interviewing someone who doesn't like him will lead to him calling for your broadcast licence to be revoked, where judges who listen to cases about America's friend Israel get sanctioned.
More importantly to this topic however, your responses seem to be shifting the goal posts somewhat.
You replied to a comment which I agreed in my opening words was overstating case, that it was under-estimating the difficulty and time needed to switch.
What I'm saying is that Europe can, in fact, switch — just slower than bgwalter said.
I'm not saying it should ("should" depends on things I don't know), I'm saying it *can*. I'm saying the option is open.
Trump or anyone else can absolutely go on a rant on Twitter as a First Amendment right. It doesn't matter if you or anyone doesn't like what he has to say. But his rants are not the Law and any law that is passed in US can be challenged in the Supreme Court. If you believe that calling someone “cis” on Twitter is not hate speech and should be considered free speech, then sue Twitter, you have that choice and freedom in the US.
The situation in China is completely different. Laws there are effectively set in stone, whether you like them or not, and regardless of whether they violate your rights. Good luck challenging them.
Finally, Europe can do many things, it can switch to Chinese tech, keep using whatever they have or it can ditch modern technology altogether and go back to 1980s technology (if we're talking about what they can do). Given the current rate of deindustrialization in Europe’s largest economy, they may soon be using 1980s technology anyway.
Legacy publishers in general (and a few big ones in particular, like der Spiegel) have been lobbying hard for legislatures to redirect big tech revenue to their failing businesses.
The focus on AI here is really just the continuation of that ongoing fight that has been raging for over a decade now. If it wasn't that, it would be some other wedge.
I'm not saying Google is squeaky-clean here, far from it. However, it's important to keep in mind that the main drive here is to get publishers paid, not to force Google to be accountable to some specific standards.
But on the other hand, when the summaries are accurate (which they aren't always!) they can be beneficial to consumers, so it isn't obviously bad either.
But every news website does the same when they summarize the news from other news websites. Which they do all the time.
And if publisher's rights will be the downfall of that entertainment, I totally get it, but it will be a sad day anyway... (and, quite frankly, my money is still on "libel" for the reason these summaries get nuked in Europe, and it'll be an UK court, not the EU, that triggers this).
If I'm to pay (indirectly) for the content which is used to form the response, we need to match the content that was actually used, not just the content that was sourced, otherwise we'd be rewarding SEO garbage again.
There also seems to be a second issue about Google using YouTuber videos without their consent to train AI, which may be the more pertinent issue the EU is investigating.
What do you really think about this case in particular? I'm pretty curious where this comes from.
Newspapers have been doing this for at least a century, while news radio and news broadcasts have done it since their inception.
Just do be clear, I use genAI all the time for finding info and answering questions, so my browsing habits changed as well. I'm the kind of person who this case would indirectly be about. But don't you think that it's valuable to look at how do we compensate people who create content when their content is being used by genAI.
Many people seem to have the feeling of 'oh it's too late and those websites were garbage anyway (whatever that means), who cares'. Don't you think that's a bit of a silly way to go about this?
But why should we compensate them simply because their content is being consumed by AI? For me, any kind of compensation MUST take relevance into account, otherwise we'll reward quantity and not quality, thus quality won't be preserved.
Maybe the answer is to actually NOT do any compensation like that, instead focusing solely on attribution so that it's in people's interest to reward select creators manually to keep the content valuable.