Key takeaways Japan’s Fair Trade Commission is targeting Google, Microsoft, LY Corp, OpenAI, and Perplexity AI over artificial intelligence search practices. The investigation focuses on the unauthori...
The Japan Fair Trade Commission announced Tuesday it will investigate both domestic and foreign IT companies offering generative AI search services, according to officials familiar with the matter.
The probe is expected to target Japanese tech giant LY Corp and U.S. firms Google and Microsoft, which all provide AI search services, as well as conversational AI operators, including OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, and Perplexity AI Inc.
"The investigation is not intended as a crackdown, but rather to gain a better understanding of the situation," a commission official said, according to Nikkei Asia.
The commission suspects that the unauthorized use of articles from news organizations by IT companies in their display of search results may constitute an abuse of their dominant market position in violation of Japan's antimonopoly law.
AI-powered search engines use natural language processing to generate summarized answers from data collected across the internet, providing users with more direct responses than traditional search engines.
However, this technology has raised significant concerns among content creators.
News agencies generate revenue primarily through advertising displayed on their websites, and the proliferation of AI-generated news summaries that keep users away from original sources threatens to undermine this business model.
The decision to launch the investigation comes amid a series of lawsuits and protests by Japanese news organizations against Perplexity AI over its conversational AI service.
Media companies have alleged copyright infringement and raised concerns that the system uses news articles without permission.
Earlier this month, Kyodo News lodged a formal protest with Perplexity demanding compensation for unauthorized use of its articles.
The current investigation represents an extension of work the commission began in 2023.
Two years ago, the watchdog published a report on contracts for the internet distribution of news by major IT companies.
In that report, the commission warned that one-sided contract changes significantly lowering payments to news organizations for their articles would constitute a violation of the antimonopoly law.
Japan's move aligns with similar actions by competition authorities worldwide.
Earlier this month, the European Commission launched a formal antitrust investigation into Google's use of publisher and YouTube content to train its generative AI systems, including AI Overviews and Gemini.
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