By Edith Hancock
The European Union opened an antitrust investigation into Alphabet's Google, citing concerns about how the search giant uses uploaded content on platforms such as YouTube to power and train its artificial-intelligence tools.
The European Commission said Tuesday that it is looking into whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers or by giving itself privileged access to their content. The EU's executive arm said such practices could put Google's own AI tools at an advantage over competitors.
The watchdog said it is concerned that Google might have unfairly used publishers' content to provide AI-powered services such as its AI Overviews and used content uploaded to its YouTube video streaming platform to train its own generative AI models.
Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.
"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," Teresa Ribera, the bloc's competition commissioner, said in a statement Tuesday.
The new probe comes less than a month after the commission--the bloc's competition regulator tasked with policing the world's most powerful companies--began investigating Google over how the tech giant ranks news publishers in search results.
The competition regulator has also intensified its scrutiny of how Big Tech companies are bringing AI into their services. The commission on Thursday opened an investigation into Meta Platforms over how the company is weaving its own AI bot into messaging service WhatsApp and how that affects the ability of competing AI providers to operate on the platform.
Write to Edith Hancock at edith.hancock@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
12-09-25 0421ET
