On September 10, 2024, Senator Amy Klobuchar, alongside several colleagues, urged the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission to investigate generative AI products for potential antitrust violations. Their concern centers on how dominant online platforms use AI to summarize or repurpose original content, harming journalists and other digital publishers by keeping users on their own platforms. This, they argue, may represent exclusionary conduct, reducing competition and threatening content creators’ ability to earn compensation. The senators are pushing for an investigation into whether these AI tools violate antitrust laws.
The letter in part reads:
“While a traditional search result or news feed links may lead users to the publisher’s website, an AI-generated summary keeps the users on the original search platform, where that platform alone can profit from the user’s attention through advertising and data collection, [ … ] Moreover, some generative AI features misappropriate third-party content and pass it off as novel content generated by the platform’s AI.”
While the letter doesn’t focus exclusively on Google, it is clear that Klobuchar and others in the senate are concerned about generative AI’s impact on the ad and search industries.