EU investigates Google over AI-generated summaries in search results

Posted by hackerbeat 19 hours ago

Counter55Comment111OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by Zufriedenheit 18 hours ago

Many news articles have social media posts as sources. Most articles have other articles as sources. And then wikipedia takes the info from the news articles and compiles them. Now google takes all of these and creates summaries again and they have links to original sources in the ai summaries. EU Commission seems very naive and fallen out of time. They are not gonna stuff the AI revolution back into the bottle no matter how hard they try.

Comment by hackerbeat 14 hours ago

Relying on AI to just ‘summarize and link back’ is like expecting a blender to cook a gourmet meal - it’s technically doing something, but the nuance gets lost. Meanwhile, millions of site owners are already watching their traffic drop like ice cubes in a hot sun. The EU isn’t ‘anti-AI,’ they’re just noticing the kitchen is on fire.

Comment by timpera 19 hours ago

I'm pretty excited to see how this will develop, especially in the context of "Google Zero". Proving the existence of an anti-competitive effect and quantifying it precisely could be difficult.

Comment by abirch 18 hours ago

I wonder if this will turn into the equivalent of music streaming. Where there's a pot of money that's allocated to different sources. Regardless this is going to negatively impact the current news business model (as do ad blockers and sites that prevent paywalls)

Comment by ismailmaj 18 hours ago

Just in time for the monthly EU bashing

Comment by munksbeer 22 minutes ago

Weekly.

Comment by boplicity 18 hours ago

Google's AI summaries are actively harming quite a lot of people. They're regularly filled with misinformation, but they're presented as facts, complete with references. Many people do not understand the limitations of this technology, and simply believe what they're presented.

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.)

Comment by akersten 19 hours ago

> The European Commission said it would examine whether the firm used data from websites to provide this service - and if it failed to offer "appropriate compensation" to publishers.

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.

Comment by pjc50 18 hours ago

Somewhat more difficult to run a business when an American multinational steals your revenue and your content.

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.

Comment by nalnq 18 hours ago

I thought here in HN we agreed that copying information was not stealing? You know, how you are not depriving the original website of their information or anything, because everything can be copied infinitely.

Comment by hopelite 18 hours ago

> make sure that the AI summaries are just as liable for libel actions

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.

Comment by jasonvorhe 17 hours ago

Does Google still follow robots.txt? I think so. Should be easy to exclude Google Crawlers if that's what you're after. But of course everyone wants to profit off of Google's reach so excluding them won't work for most either.

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.

Comment by re-thc 17 hours ago

> Somewhat more difficult to run a business when an American multinational steals your revenue and your content.

Somewhat more difficult to run a business when EU commissioners keep making up fines to steal your revenue.

Comment by ben_w 11 hours ago

Ignorance of the law is, famously, not an excuse.

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.

Comment by lokar 18 hours ago

This style/tone of discourse is really disrespectful and not very interesting.

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.

Comment by ndr 18 hours ago

It's a prediction. What's disrespectful?

Comment by lokar 16 hours ago

It dismisses an entire point of view out of hand without any real argument.

Comment by pb7 18 hours ago

I persuade you to build more and fine less. https://x.com/da_fant/status/1998090511807381613?s=20

Comment by frm88 3 hours ago

Could you please provide the source for this graph? Something more serious than twitter or Instagram?

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/...

Comment by az09mugen 3 hours ago

Thanks for searching and finding the source of the graph.

Comment by mhitza 18 hours ago

Play by the rules or don't operate in the EU market? Seems straightforward to me.

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.

Comment by re-thc 17 hours ago

> Play by the rules or don't operate in the EU market? Seems straightforward to me.

Sounds like an invite for no 1 to operate. The rules just keep growing faster than the AI bubble.

Comment by mhitza 16 hours ago

> 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.

Comment by brisket_bronson 18 hours ago

I couldn't find any source for this chart other than the picture on Twitter. Do you have the source?

Comment by re-thc 18 hours ago

> The EU is a big place with a lot going on.

Like investigations into Apple, X and others...

Comment by lokar 17 hours ago

Again, why are you here? Either actually engage (make more detailed points based in fact, or ask real questions, or both), or take it to Twitter .

Comment by pjmlp 18 hours ago

There are plenty of European businesses, our salaries don't grow on trees.

Comment by riedel 18 hours ago

And those pay our taxes. I think of there was a decent digital tax, the EC would also have a better motivation to just move on...

Comment by constantcrying 18 hours ago

The idea that just because Europe still has some profitable businesses left, there is no need to compete for global technological leadership is so absurd that even putting it into words is hard.

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.

Comment by Nextgrid 18 hours ago

> compete for global technological leadership

Yet every time the EU tries to enforce regulations so that technological competition becomes actually possible everyone is mad about it.

Comment by pb7 18 hours ago

How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete? How come OpenAI or Anthropic or Cursor didn't come out of the EU? I'll give you a hint, it's not because of big bad Google.

Comment by mhitza 18 hours ago

> How come OpenAI or Anthropic or Cursor didn't come out of the EU?

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.

Comment by pb7 18 hours ago

Why do you think there is more funding in the US?

Comment by mhitza 17 hours ago

I don't know the legislation and contract law pertains to funding, and why EU companies need to move to the US to get investor funds (and can't be funded internationally while retaining EU status).

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).

Comment by fullofideas 18 hours ago

While I agree with the sentiment, it is not true that only EU takes a “nationalistic” stance and safeguards its interests. US is famously doing it with tariffs..to bring back manufacturing, and I also remember hearing “America first”.

Doesn’t make what EU is doing right, just that everyone is stifling outside competition in some form.

Comment by re-thc 17 hours ago

> How come only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete?

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.

Comment by Nextgrid 18 hours ago

> only the EU needs to stifle existing companies to be able to have a chance to compete [emphasis mine]

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).

Comment by constantcrying 18 hours ago

Competition by whom? The entire EU software industry is completely pathetic.

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.

Comment by az09mugen 3 hours ago

Username checks out.

Comment by Nextgrid 18 hours ago

> China has been steadily moving towards being an actual competitor to the US

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.

Comment by constantcrying 17 hours ago

>China is in this position because of regulations

Then the regulations of the EC just fucking sucked and destroyed all chances of the EU ever having a competitive software industry.

Comment by Nextgrid 17 hours ago

The regulations were good, it's just that enforcement was and remains dysfunctional and basically non-existent.

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.

Comment by pjmlp 18 hours ago

There is more to the economy than technology bros.

Comment by constantcrying 17 hours ago

I am not a "tech bro" at all. Read the post, my salary is part of European manufacturing.

Comment by pjmlp 16 hours ago

So what? There is more to the economy than AI startups with SV money.

Comment by paganel 18 hours ago

Our salaries have certainly not kept up with the pace from across the Atlantic, I'm talking last 10 to 15 years.

Comment by dns_snek 18 hours ago

When you say "our", do you mean "the median employee", tech workers, or some other group?

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.

Comment by paganel 18 hours ago

> tech workers, or some other group?

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.

Comment by pjmlp 18 hours ago

They need those salaries to pay for health insurance, and being fired on the spot with security escort, without anyone to fallback into.

Comment by nalnq 18 hours ago

[dead]

Comment by pjmlp 18 hours ago

Guess how the government gets the money from the taxes.

Comment by monero-xmr 18 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by q3k 18 hours ago

You got some sources for those numbers?

Comment by monero-xmr 18 hours ago

https://www.unedic.org/publications/qui-sont-les-allocataire...

translated:

> Of the 6.2 million people registered with France Travail in the 3rd quarter of 2024, 6 out of 10 are beneficiaries supported by the Unemployment Insurance. Persons not in charge of the Unemployment Insurance have not worked sufficiently to open a right or to reload it, or work on a contract that has not been broken, or are out of the field (part of the civil service, resignations and self-employed). Within the 3.8 million people in care, 2.6 million receive compensation. Those in care but who do not receive an allowance have generally worked and received a high salary relative to their reference salary. They may also be covered by the Health Insurance or in deferred compensation at the beginning of their right.

> Those under 35 represent a significant proportion of the beneficiaries (41%). They are more frequently hired for limited-time contracts, which more often leads them to grant unemployment insurance.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/the-decline-of-europe-in-gallic-...

> Meanwhile, public spending accounts for 57% of the French GDP. And “to ensure the financing of spending for those over 65,” it will steadily increase to 60.8% by 2070, the Court of Auditors found. That’s assuming per capita spending stays at 2023 levels instead of increasing. Social spending will inevitably crowd out other priorities, including defense.

Comment by q3k 18 hours ago

> Those under 35 represent a significant proportion of the beneficiaries (41%).

This doesn't mean '40% unemployment in France for under 35 and they all get welfare'. It means 41% of unemployment insurance beneficiaries are under 35.

I'm also still looking for a source for 'the majority live on the dole and out vote the productive class.' and 'Soon the retired will outnumber the workers.'.

Comment by monero-xmr 17 hours ago

The same WSJ oped said:

> Someone’s got to pay as papa becomes grand-père, but the forecast is bleak. Today there are 39 seniors for every 100 working-age people in France. But by 2070 working-age French will account for only 50% of the population, down from more than 55% in 2023.

If only half the population is working-age and many of them are on the dole or not working (as they are now), it's quite clear the entire social appartus will need to be supported by a fraction of the population. To be clear - this will not work! The political turbulence in France will only increase. They can't even sustain their minor reduction in retirement age from 64 to 62 without the government imploding. There is literally zero chance of saving this system. Collapse followed by massive cuts is the only way

Comment by SPICLK2 18 hours ago

Where "curve" = "exporting shiny toys without thought to long-term consequences". Good to see the EU is finally catching up to the harms of this and other US web tech.

Comment by peterspath 18 hours ago

Europe is awesome. The European Union sucks at the moment. It should go back to its roots and be a European Free Trade Association only. It is enough.

Comment by maelito 18 hours ago

No startup is as big as Google Search. They're far from being hindered by this EU investigation.

Comment by Spivak 18 hours ago

It's not really about Google, I think the reason that HN in general is.. annoyed at the actions of the EU is because they're worried these rulings will be far reaching. This one in particular: fetching content from a website and feeding it to an AI to extract information or summarize it requires that the person doing it "compensate" the website operator. Well there goes one of the most useful tools in the AI toolbox being able to search the web for external information. It also codifies that accessing a webpage is a weird kind of transaction which also might put ad blockers in a weird legal grey area.

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.

Comment by jraph 19 hours ago

Behind which curve and how so?

Comment by DeathArrow 18 hours ago

Behind the curve of big tech businesses generating a lot of GDP and economic growth?

Comment by Nextgrid 18 hours ago

A lot of said Big Tech is based on industrial-scale fraud and exploitation of the consumer so that a rich few can benefit. Not exactly something to be proud of.

(though we too have that in Europe in the form of high taxes, so that a rich few politicians benefit)

Comment by lores 18 hours ago

Behind the curve of worshipping economic growth over citizen well-being, and behind the curve of being an outright plutocracy, too, so there's that.

Comment by bgwalter 18 hours ago

I keep hearing this, especially on X which now hates the EU because it has fined X.

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.

Comment by sajithdilshan 18 hours ago

In which bubble are you living right now? Almost all the EU tech companies uses AWS, Google cloud or Microsoft Azure. Good luck with recovering any data if you completely cut off Mag7. Also Without iOS or Android play store, you're back using Nokia or Chinese counterpart.

The pure ignorance the europeans have on their tech reliance on US tech is astounding.

Comment by ben_w 10 hours ago

While I agree the other comment is overstating a bit on the speed of transition for all of the big seven at the same time (though we could probably do that for Meta, Tesla without any substitution, and Apple and Amazon if we keep Alphabet around):

> 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.

Comment by pb7 18 hours ago

>You could cut off the Magnificent 7 completely and the EU would switch to new data sources and operating systems within a month.

I can't begin to understand the level of delusion you have reached. You truly are fish unaware of the water you are in.

Comment by bgwalter 18 hours ago

You are absolutely right and I apologize for the error! Would you like me to generate a chart that shows the amount of essential products that the EU produces vs.the U.S.?

Comment by pb7 18 hours ago

I take it since you moved the goal posts that you concede the EU is not competitive in tech, correct?

Comment by chaostheory 18 hours ago

It’s called thinly veiled protectionism just like the GDPR

Comment by Nextgrid 18 hours ago

GDPR is an excellent idea if it was actually enforced, which it wasn't. To their credit, the non-enforcement was consistent regardless of whether the offender was EU-based or not.

Comment by mqus 18 hours ago

Yeah, everyone in the EU is just working on this one law case. The guy next to me just cooked the meals for the guy that made the paper the case was filed on and now has to take an extended break. /s

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.

Comment by mohsen1 18 hours ago

[flagged]

Comment by CGMthrowaway 18 hours ago

DG has added $10B of value for shareholders this year, on top of uniquely providing $40B a year of goods for a population that needs them. That's not a bad thing

Comment by mohsen1 18 hours ago

I am an American citizen living in Europe. There are grocery stores here generating billions too. They have to advertise the price including taxes. That alone is a huge advantage for the shopper that regulations enforce it.

If you're on the lower income side and have limited money to buy your groceries you don't have to guess the total price of your basket. Prices are WYSIWYG.

I didn't think things are bad in the US until I lived here in Europe for some time to realize.

Dollar General situation is bad and in a fairer system they would still make billions. Don't assume regulations that protects people automatically means bad business

Comment by hopelite 18 hours ago

That’s ironic, because I don’t see the European hiding of taxes being a benefit or WYSIWYG at all. I agree that the way it is done in the USA is also not ideal, but frankly, the majority of people in all places are, let’s just say disinterested in serious matters and don’t really care one way or the other beyond slight frustrations in their daily lives.

On net, hiding the ~20% VAT in the price of all goods in Europe is far worse and exactly why it is done, so you don’t think about it and don’t how much the ruling class has decided to plunder, by that one of many methods it plunders the lower classes.

Ideally, in a consumer, citizen centered society the price would have to be listed separately along side of the tax on the same label. There is today absolutely no reason that could not be done and it would make people realize both how much the ruling class/government plunders, as well as e.g., in the U.S. produce is far cheaper than processed foods because it is usually not taxed.

If information is deliberately hidden from you, you are no longer a citizen, but rather something more like a serf, a slave, or a mark of a con job; especially in an era where governments all across the west are hostile to and don’t represent anyone but their own self-interest, let alone their own people anymore.

Comment by reef_sh 17 hours ago

To be clear. This information is not hidden. Every receipt you receive will have the VAT % of each individual item written down, and VAT % of certain kinds of items are often discussed as part of regular politics and very present on public consciousness.

Comment by hopelite 15 hours ago

You are missing the point even though I rather clearly indicated it. This is not a question of whether you or I see the taxes as we likely both care to similar degrees, it’s about whether it is front and center for regular people to see at the point of gratification contact line, i.e., looking at the product on the shelf.

The taxes in the US are also very clearly indicated on receipts, but that does not change that when you are looking at a price in Europe, you are appeased looking at it with a bias of assumed, baked in taxes. It’s a psychological difference related to loss aversion. Is precisely why the European rulers pushed to hide the taxes in the price so you don’t even think about it, opposed to additional monies being taken from you at the point of sale.

It’s the very same reason why they pushed for employer to take all the massive taxes and costs and “contributions” out of one’s paycheck because handing over a check of some five digit amount every year to the government would be far more of a galling issue to most people than having it taken out of toe paycheck once a month and you normalized it and take it for granted. Talk to anyone that runs a personal business admit how they feel writing 6 or 7 digit checks to the government every quarter or so, before you grow past having someone that just does it as a matter of their role and they have no vested interest in whether any amount is paid.

It astonishes me that people like you seem to be oblivious of the effects of these kinds of tricks and games, when this community is regularly discussing social engineering, dark patterns, marketing gobbledygook, etc. You think the government made up of liars that lie about everything, including lying; the people who cover up child rape of the Epstein kind and the rape gangs of the Brush Labour Party that numbers somewhere near ~250,000 victims of child gang rape … they wouldn’t have evaluated which way is better to hoodwink the multitude and minimize anger offer being pilfered?

Comment by dns_snek 20 minutes ago

> It astonishes me that people like you seem to be oblivious of the effects of these kinds of tricks and games, when this community is regularly discussing social engineering, dark patterns, marketing gobbledygook, etc.

Don't you see the hypocrisy of talking about "dark patterns" while trying to use every psychological trick in the book to trigger people's emotional responses that are opposed to their rational beliefs?

Sure, most of us will complain about taxes being higher than we like sometimes, but most of us also understand that those taxes pay for services that the vast majority of us want and rely on - we want healthcare, safety nets, infrastructure, quality education, etc. We can argue about a few % here or there but we also understand that we couldn't have those things if all of our taxes were substantially lower.

We already have transparency as all taxes and contributions are plainly documented on every receipt, pay slip, and tax invoice. Laypeople argue about taxes all the time, they complain about VAT and income taxes being too high, they aren't under the illusion you think they are.

Your entire strategy seems to be making bureaucracy and every day activities as irritating, anxiety-inducing, bias-inducing, and stressful as possible when it comes to taxes in order to get people to turn on taxes entirely. That's not transparency but subversion of people's self-interests through dark patterns you claim to oppose.

> Talk to anyone that runs a personal business admit how they feel writing 6 or 7 digit checks to the government every quarter or so

It feels gut-wrenching in the moment, but I don't believe that public policy should be influenced by our fleeting emotional reactions and I'm surprised to hear this quiet part said out loud.

Comment by Spivak 18 hours ago

Everyone likes to hate on Dollar General but they made a little over $1 billion in profit on a little over $40 billion of goods sold which is a 2.7% profit margin. In terms of real value delivered to customers it's really hard to beat that. Kroger by comparison is 1.8%. In both cases we're talking about less than 3 cents of profit per dollar.

Comment by ZeroGravitas 17 hours ago

Slightly worrying that there's two comments replying to an article about deliberate overcharging of consumers with responses about how profitable that is for them.

Comment by Spivak 16 hours ago

I mean the answer is "not very profitable." They're making less profit as a percentage of revenue than Costco. They absolutely should do better at updating the tags on their shelves but they're less making it rain and more getting pelted with pennies.

Comment by grosswait 18 hours ago

But the EU ensures plenty of work for lawyers

Comment by randunel 18 hours ago

Having worked with both EU and non-EU companies, I disagree. US companies seem to be the most litigious, and EU companies more diligent. I've not observed any lawyer involvement from companies in Russia, Serbia, India, but my experience is rather limited there.

Comment by mtoner23 18 hours ago

America has much more lawyers per capital than almost all European countries

Comment by kwanbix 18 hours ago

It is a joke, right? If there is a country where lawyrs thrive is the USA.

Comment by Alex2037 18 hours ago

the events of the past month are a very clear indicator that EU bureaucrats are borderline delusional.

I wish the US would call their bluff and avenge those bullshit fines sevenfold with tariffs.

Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 17 hours ago

Further behind on what? The rape of their citizens by big tech?

Comment by ZeroConcerns 18 hours ago

Although that certainly would have been possible, I've not yet blocked the Gemini AI summaries from the Google search result pages, just because they're so entertaining, in a "sure, bot, you got that entirely wrong" sort of way.

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).

Comment by sajithdilshan 18 hours ago

Why does is feel like EU is creating problems out of nothing just to keep their bureaucrats busy rather than actually doing something worthwhile with tax payers money?

Comment by BDPW 18 hours ago

Appropriate compensation is a non-issue? I have the impression many people jump on the hate-EU train for no other reason than there's many comments reinforcing it.

What do you really think about this case in particular? I'm pretty curious where this comes from.

Comment by sajithdilshan 18 hours ago

Appropriate compensation for what? The summary is generated on the publicly available information.

Comment by BDPW 18 hours ago

If using data from those websites in a way decreases their visitors or something similar then I think there's an argument to be made for that. I don't know the details to case but just because something is publicly visible doesn't mean that you can just do anything you want with it.

Comment by Aloisius 14 hours ago

Every major news site in Europe is full of articles full of "The New York Times reported that [summary]" so I'm a bit confused as to why, all of a sudden, it's a problem.

Newspapers have been doing this for at least a century, while news radio and news broadcasts have done it since their inception.

Comment by sajithdilshan 18 hours ago

There is no guarantee that a website would get a visit if there was no AI summary. Also you can do anything you want with public domain information. That's the whole point of it being public. Otherwise it should be licensed or copyrighted content.

Comment by zb3 18 hours ago

Who should receive the compensation? If I want to know the answer to a particular question and most search results point to SEO garbage which doesn't even answer it, then who should be compensated and for what? If those SEO garbage websites are to be compensated, doesn't that just incentivize more garbage?

Comment by BDPW 18 hours ago

I don't know. I don't really care about the details in this case, I just don't really get the dismissive attitude that often surrounds things like this. Do you think this is not something that is worth looking into if it happens at such as large scale?

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?

Comment by zb3 18 hours ago

> 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.

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.

Comment by Mistletoe 18 hours ago

I’m often horrified to follow them down the rabbit hole and see it is a Redditor’s comment. That should terrify you if you have ever used Reddit. Sometimes it is correct, but a lot of times it is very much not right.

Comment by conartist6 18 hours ago

That's accountability-washing in action.

Comment by paganel 18 hours ago

> I’m often horrified to follow them down the rabbit hole and see it is a Redditor’s comment.

Genuine question, how are you able to do that? Searching by exact matches with some portions of the AI suggested "response"? Some other method?

Comment by brainwad 18 hours ago

There are little link icons at the end of each paragraph. They open a list of sources.

Comment by hopelite 18 hours ago

I still have not gotten anyone to provide a reasonable response to a simple question; if training an AI on some content, how is your reading the same content and then including that in a synthesis of that information along with other information to form your own understanding of the world any different?

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.

Comment by boplicity 18 hours ago

A training dataset is a document, not a method of processing a document. This type of document regularly gets reproduced and distributed in a commercial environment. Even if the distribution is contained within a large corporation, it still counts as distribution. Should that be allowed within the scope of copyright law? This seems like a legitimate question.

Comment by re-thc 18 hours ago

Soon the European Commission will investigate the EU for all its investigations.

They might as well just ban all non-EU tech at this point.

Comment by cubefox 18 hours ago

It seems highly unlikely that AI summaries violate European copyright law. Human summarization is perfectly legal.

Comment by Chabsff 18 hours ago

It's not just a pure matter of law, and looking at it from that perspective is naive.

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.

Comment by thayne 18 hours ago

I think the argument isn't that it is copyright violation so much as it is anticompetitive. Google is using its monopoly in search to disadvantage its competitors in serving ads (other websites).

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.

Comment by cubefox 18 hours ago

> I think the argument isn't that it is copyright violation so much as it is anticompetitive. Google is using its monopoly in search to disadvantage its competitors in serving ads (other websites).

But every news website does the same when they summarize the news from other news websites. Which they do all the time.

Comment by thayne 17 hours ago

But those news sites don't have a monopoly.

Comment by cubefox 3 hours ago

Google competes now with ChatGPT, which can also summarize using web search. Here they definitely don't have a monopoly.

Comment by zb3 19 hours ago

Compensation to which publishers? To those providing links to SEO spam?

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.

Comment by NewsaHackO 18 hours ago

This is what I don't get. I feel as though the people complaining about this are not the primary source of the information anyway. I wonder if Google already has a way for websites to opt out of the AI mode results (of course, since their sites are not adding any actual new information, there will not be a loss to them). From the search results, it seems like Google has constructed a "Knowledge Graph" LLM which it uses to answer questions in the search results and provide links to sources. How is that different from how every other LLM works?

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.

Comment by OBELISK_ASI 18 hours ago

[dead]