ANTITRUST | The European Commission opened an investigation against Google for possible abuse of dominant position

On the 9 December 2025, the European Commission (Commission) opened an investigation to assess whether Google has been abusing of its dominant position as prohibited by Article 102 Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) by using contents of web publishers and contents uploaded on YouTube for Artificial Intelligence (AI) training purposes. More particularly, the Commission is concerned that Google may have imposed unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, without granting them appropriate compensation for the use of their content to provide generative AI-powered services (in particular, “AI Overviews” and “AI Mode”) and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use without the consequent loss of access to Google Search. Even if the uploaders of contents on YouTube have an obligation to grant Google permission to use their data for different purposes, among which the training generative AI models, they don’t seem to be remunerated for this. In light of this, the Commission affirmed that Google may have granted itself privileged access to those contents, being competitors barred by YouTube policies from using of the content of the Platform to train their own AI models, placing them at a competitive disadvantage.

Newsletter n. 113 – December 2025