EU Launches Antitrust Probe into Google’s AI Practices: Is Big Tech Eating the Internet’s Lunch Without Paying the Bill?
As the very eventful AI defining 2025 winds up, the European Commission dropped a not-so-festive December 9 gift on Google: an antitrust investigation into how the tech giant uses web publishers’ content, including YouTube videos, to fuel its generative AI tools.
This probe is the latest in Brussels’ long-running saga with Alphabet. At the core of this allegation is Google’s abuse of its dominant position in search for harvest of vast amounts of high-quality content from creators and publishers to power AI output and AI Mode in search results without fair compensation or meaningful opt-out options.
What’s under scrutiny?
Publisher content — articles and other web content being used to generate AI summaries that answer user queries completely, leaving little reason to click through to the original content source.
YouTube videos — creators forced to upload content to YouTube under terms that allow Google to train AI models, but locking out competitors from the same data trove.
Lack of real choice — creators who try to block their content from Google’s AI training risk lose of visibility in search rankings altogether.
EU Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera puts it plainly:
“AI brings remarkable innovation and many benefits, but this progress cannot come at the expense of the principles at the heart of our societies. A healthy information ecosystem depends on publishers having the resources to produce quality content.”
That means: You can’t build the smartest AI in the world by eating everyone else’s lunch for free.
Why this investigation matters right now?
For publishers and journalists, the impact is already real, with traffic to original sources dropping sharply as users get detailed AI-generated answers without ever leaving Google’s results page.
For YouTube creators, it’s a one-sided deal: their videos help make Google’s AI more capable, yet they see no additional revenue or control.
For everyday users, quick AI answers are convenient—until the collapse of the ecosystem producing quality content due to the pressure of uneven benefit at the expense of human-led creativity.
And for other AI companies? Inaccess to the same rich training data, giving Google more unfair advantage.
This isn’t Google’s first brush with EU regulators, as it already paid billions in fines, including a €2.95 billion penalty in September 2025 over ad tech practices. If violations are confirmed, fines could reach 10% of global annual revenue—a number that would make even Santa wince.
Google’s response so far? A spokesperson argued that the investigation “risks stifling innovation in a competitive market.” They point to existing opt-out tools like Google-Extended. But when you’ve been fined multiple times for dominance abuse, the “we’re just innovating” defense starts to sound like a broken record.
What Could Happen Next?
Likely outcome include:
Mandatory compensation schemes for content publishers and creators
Stronger, enforceable opt-out mechanisms
Potential structural changes to how Google handles third-party content for AI
Even more scrutiny on the AI dominance race
The EU appears to be sending a clear message: the future of AI cannot be built on the backs of creators without fair rules.