The EU Commission has more questions for Microsoft, OpenAI as well as Google and Samsung

The EU Commission has sent preliminary questions to Microsoft and OpenAI about the terms of the cooperation. The questions are about possible violations of competition law, specifically whether the deal promotes the formation of a monopoly. Now Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager said she is in the process of seeking further comments from third parties. In addition to the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI, there is also cooperation between Google and Samsung.

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Vestager made the comments at a commission workshop titled “Competition in Virtual Worlds and Generative AI.” Both are mentioned in In his speech there, he as “hot topics”. There are opportunities and risks, there are optimists and pessimists – “as a competition authority we have to be realistic” about working in the here and now. This includes checking whether new challenges arise and whether the market will continue to be dominated by established tech giants. Vestager also points out that there can only be a change from one monopoly to another – so the Commissioner admits that we are currently living with monopolies.

Microsoft doesn’t dominate OpenAI — but remains the subject of scrutiny

In order not to repeat the mistakes of the past that led to the internet and the market concentration we have today, one must first understand the market. In March questionnaires were sent to a number of market participants, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and TikTok. Apparently the answers were not enough, now come the questions.

In particular, for example, it was about whether the cooperation of Microsoft and OpenAI involves exclusivity, which has a negative impact on other market participants. Microsoft should not have any control over OpenAI – at least according to the initial investigation results, they do not have it. The new thing is that the acquisition of Inflection by Microsoft is being monitored. Inflection will report to former Google DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and will work on developing its own language models.

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In addition, Google’s partnership with Samsung has come to the attention of competition watchers. Google’s larger language model Gemini Nano is pre-installed on Samsung devices; this is Google’s smallest model in the Gemini family that is optimized for mobile devices. Vestager also says that more research remains to be done around the AI-based market.

“The possibilities presented by AI seem endless. They range from everyday things like speeding up customer relationships, administrative tasks or software development. Including cool things like drug discovery and development or personalized medical treatment plans,” says Vestager and also calls for caution. The Commissioner also positively highlights the investigations of individual member countries and the fine that Google had to pay because they used content from publishers in France to train Gemini – but they did not have permission to do so. According to Vestager, the Digital Markets Act (DMA) also applies to AI companies and AI applications – even though this regulation in its current form did not take AI into account when it was created.

(EMW)