US Senators Call for Investigation into Use of AI in Online Content | Festina Lente - Your leading source of AI news | Turtles AI
US Senators Call for Investigation into Use of AI in Online Content
Concerns about anti-competitive practices and potential exploitation of creators and publishers by big tech platforms
Isabella V
A group of Democratic senators, led by Amy Klobuchar, has urged the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether big tech companies’ practices in using generative AI violate antitrust laws. In their letter, the senators point the finger at giants like Google and Meta, who they accuse of keeping users on their platforms thanks to AI-generated summaries, depriving content creators of traffic and, consequently, advertising revenue. This problem comes amid a growing crisis in the publishing industry, with cuts and consolidations that undermine the sustainability of news organizations.
Key Points:
- Democratic senators are calling on US regulators to investigate potential anti-competitive behavior related to the use of generative AI by big tech companies.
- Google and Meta’s AI features are accused of reducing traffic to content creators’ sites, keeping users on search platforms.
- The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is already investigating investments and partnerships between cloud giants and AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.
- Publishers complain that online platforms could exploit original content without offering compensation, harming the news industry.
The use of AI by large platforms raises competition concerns. While links in search results used to direct users to publishers’ sites, now automatically generated summaries keep traffic on the platforms themselves, allowing only the platforms to benefit from advertising revenue. Google’s new AI capabilities, for example, summarize content such as news and recipes, preventing publishers from exploiting the traffic generated by their content. Publishers can theoretically prevent this “appropriation” of their content by turning off search indexing, but that would drastically reduce their audiences.
This has led lawmakers to call for an FTC review to determine whether such practices are anti-competitive or a violation of U.S. antitrust laws. FTC Chairwoman Lina Khan has previously said that competition in the AI era must be carefully monitored to prevent innovation from being monopolized by a few large companies. In parallel, the agency has opened investigations into major investments that companies such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon are making in startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, to understand whether such collaborations could limit competition in the sector.
The main concern of the senators is that the companies that control the online ecosystem are exercising ever greater control over content without adequately compensating creators, exacerbating the financial problems of news organizations. This debate is also part of a broader panorama of legislative discussions in the United States: last year, Senator Klobuchar herself introduced a bill to strengthen the negotiating power of publishers, allowing them to ask for payments for the use of their content by platforms such as Google.
The issue therefore seems destined to remain at the center of the political debate, with potential repercussions on the way in which technology companies manage the market for digital content and advertising. While the FTC and the Department of Justice will explore these issues, the possibility of new federal laws to regulate the sector is not excluded.
