Eight senators sent a letter to the FTC urging an investigation into the antitrust implications of AI-generated content summaries by companies like Google. They argue that these summaries take content from publishers without permission, reducing traffic and revenue for original content creators. The only way for publishers to prevent this is to opt out of search engine indexing, which would damage their businesses. The senators expressed concern that AI summaries direct users to the platform displaying the summary, not to the content creators, further entrenching monopolies.
I flagged this issue back in May after Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced AI Overviews at Google I/O (see: Google “AI Overviews” – The End of Link-Based Search), though I didn’t see the antitrust angle at the time.
What fascinates me is how quickly the AI summary threat to link-based search caught the attention of lawmakers. Four months is practically a world record in politics. Summarization is a core function of every text-to-text generative AI model; I’m not sure the FTC or antitrust laws are the right mechanisms to address this, but I’m not a lawyer.
That said, regulating AI summaries could be practically impossible, and it’s unclear if regulation is even necessary. This might just be the next natural step in the evolution of the web. Or it would have been… now that U.S. legislators are trying to put their thumbs on the scale, we’ll see how it goes.
Author’s note: This is not a sponsored post. I am the author of this article and it expresses my own opinions. I am not, nor is my company, receiving compensation for it. This work was created with the assistance of various generative AI models.