EU Opens Antitrust Probe Into Google’s AI Overviews and YouTube Training

The clash echoes the 1998–2001 US v. Microsoft case, where bundling Internet Explorer into Windows was ruled anti-competitive; both involve a dominant platform leveraging a captive asset (desktop OS then, user-generated content now) to strangle emergent rivals. More broadly it fits a decades-long EU agenda—seen in the 2017 €2.4 bn Google Shopping and 2024 AI Act—to curb US tech gatekeepers and assert digital sovereignty. At stake is whether data itself becomes an enclosed corporate resource or a shared infrastructure, a question reminiscent of 19th-century enclosure of common lands and likely to shape information markets for the next century. Whichever way Brussels rules, the precedent will inform how AI models worldwide source training material, determining who captures the economic rents of the coming era of algorithmic knowledge production.