The U.K.’s competition watchdog has sounded a warning over Big Tech’s entrenching grip on the advanced AI market, with CEO Sarah Cardell expressing “real concerns” over how the sector is developing.
She said it’s important that competition enforcers don’t repeat the same mistakes with this next generation of digital development.
But for now the CMA has not gone that far, despite clear and growing concerns about cozy GAMMA GenAI ties.
“It may be that some arrangements falling outside the merger rules are problematic, even if not ultimately remediable through merger control.
(The short version of what it wants to see is: accountablity; access; diversity; choice; flexibility; fair dealing; and transparency.)
The Coalition for App Fairness (CAF) released a statement on Thursday cheering on the Department of Justice’s antitrust lawsuit against Apple.
The group includes a number of key app makers, including Epic Games, Spotify, Deezer, Match Group, Proton and others.
In 2020, Epic made it possible for Fortnite players to pay Epic directly, rather than giving a cut to Apple.
Then, Apple removed Epic from the App Store, which sparked a slew of legal proceedings.
In a statement, Apple said: “This lawsuit threatens who we are and the principles that set Apple products apart in fiercely competitive markets.
Google hit with $270M fine in France as authority finds news publishers’ data was used for GeminiIn a never-ending saga between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence announced a €250 million fine against the tech giant Wednesday (around $270 million at today’s exchange rate).
The competition authority has found fault with Google for failing to notify news publishers of this GenAI use of their copyrighted content.
But the competition authority quickly stepped in – finding its unilateral action an abuse of a dominant market position that risked harm to publishers.
But in 2021, Google was hit with a $592M fine after the competition authority found major breaches in its negotiations with local publishers and agencies.
Google has signed copyright agreements with hundreds of publishers in France – which fall under the remit of its agreement with the Autorité.
OpenAI’s legal battle with The New York Times over data to train its AI models might still be brewing.
But OpenAI’s forging ahead on deals with other publishers, including some of France’s and Spain’s largest news publishers.
OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it signed contracts with Le Monde and Prisa Media to bring French and Spanish news content to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
So, OpenAI’s revealed licensing deals with a handful of content providers at this point.
The Information reported in January that OpenAI was offering publishers between $1 million and $5 million a year to access archives to train its GenAI models.
How DMA gatekeepers are responding to the EU’s new competition rules — in their own wordsThe compliance deadline for the six tech giants regulated under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) expired yesterday.
The first batch of gatekeeper compliance reports — aka the non-confidential versions — have been published on the Commission’s DMA website.
The length is at least justified: Reflecting the fact a full eight of its products are designated as core platform services.
For handy reference, we’ve rounded up links to the gatekeepers’ first batch of public-facing DMA compliance reports below.
If you’re looking for an analytic overview of the DMA, its aims and early impacts, check out our earlier explainer.
Amazon’s cloud computing subsidiary AWS has revealed that it will allow customers to transfer their data out of its ecosystem with no so-called “egress fees” attached.
While AWS already allows customers to transfer up to 100GB of data per month off its servers for free, this won’t cover companies looking to “lift and shift” their entire data stores to another provider — and that is what is effectively changing for AWS customers as of today.
Companies that want to move their data off of AWS are requested to contact AWS, which will then apparently issue credits for the data being migrated.
It’s not clear what today’s news means in relation to the U.K.’s ongoing antitrust probe into cloud lock-in practices.
Another issue identified by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) was also looking at interoperability, concerning areas where cloud companies design their products to not play nicely with rival services.
AI-powered video generation is a hot market on the back of OpenAI’s releasing Sora model last month.
Two Deepmind alums Yishu Miao and Ziyu Wang have publicly released their video generation tool Haiper with its own AI model underneath.
Video generation serviceUsers can go to Haiper’s site and start generating videos for free by typing in text prompts.
He noted that it is “too early” in the startup’s journey to think about building a subscription product around video generation.
While investors are looking to invest in AI-powered video generation startups, they also think the technology still has a lot of room for improvement.
The five finalists to emerge from the Four Years From Now 2024 pitch competitionLong ago Mobile World Congress, which we’ve been covering all week, absorbed a side event for startups, the idiosyncratically named “Four Years From Now”.
Thus, out of hundreds of startups that applied and pitched, five finalists were selected by a panel of industry experts and investors after pitching their projects on stage.
Here’s a quick run-down of the five finalists to emerge from the competition.
The company is from South Korea and has raised $21.3 million to date.
WHISPPThis “Assistive Voice Tech and Calling App” was covered by TechCrunch last January.
It also includes a commitment to let customers change cloud providers, or services within the cloud, if they choose to.
It also details a focus on building cybersecurity around AI services; attention to building data centers and other infrastructure in an environmentally-sound way; and education investments.
Brad Smith, the president and vice chair of Microsoft, announced the framework today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The announcement comes at the same time that Microsoft is coming under increasing regulatory scrutiny for its $13 billion investment in OpenAI, which currently gives it a 49% stake in the startup that is leading the charge for generative AI services globally.
In January, the European competition watchdog said that it was assessing whether the investment falls under antitrust rules.
The U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is launching a formal probe into the proposed merger between Vodafone and Three UK.
That is some 18 months form when they first revealed their plans back in June.
It’s not entirely clear how that might impact this latest merger attempt, but Smith reckons that deal is as good as dead, regardless of what any court might subsequently find.
“The previous Three/O2 merger is still technically going through the EU courts, but that deal is long since dead in reality,” Smith said.
“We strongly believe that the proposed merger of Vodafone and Three will significantly enhance competition by creating a combined business with more resources to invest in infrastructure to better compete with the two larger converged players,” Vodafone UK CEO Ahmed Essam said in a statement.
