BRUSSELS — The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Google breached EU competition rules by using the content of web publishers, as well as video uploaded to YouTube, for artificial intelligence purposes. The investigation will examine whether Google is distorting competition by imposing unfair terms and conditions on publishers and content creators, or by granting itself privileged access to such content, thus placing rival AI models at a disadvantage, the Commission said on Tuesday. In a statement, the EU executive said it was concerned that Google may have used the content of web publishers to provide generative AI-powered services on its search results pages without appropriate compensation to publishers, and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. Further, it said that the U.S. search giant may have used video and other content uploaded on YouTube to train Google’s generative AI models without compensating creators and without offering them the possibility to refuse such use of their content. The formal antitrust probe follows Google’s rollout of AI-driven search results, which resulted in a drop in traffic to online news sites. Google was fined nearly €3 billion in September for abusing its dominance in online advertising. It has proposed technical remedies over that penalty, but resisted a call by EU competition chief Teresa Ribera to break itself up.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission may act as sole enforcer of the EU’s Big Tech rules, but a settlement reached between Google and an Italian regulator demonstrates there is still plenty of room for its national counterparts to drive the agenda. The Italian Competition Authority disclosed on Friday that it had reached a settlement with the U.S. search giant to modify the design of its terms and conditions for users to consent to sharing their data. The investigation, which accused the tech giant of using “misleading and aggressive” commercial practices to get users to link services like Maps and Search, thus violating Italian consumer protection rules, struck at conduct that is also covered by the EU Digital Markets Act (DMA). While the DMA was designed to centralize digital enforcement in Brussels, it has not boxed out national regulators from pursuing Big Tech cases.  Responding on Monday, the Commission welcomed Google’s Italian settlement and said the changes it foresees would be rolled out EU-wide. “Google’s commitments are a good example of how the work of national authorities on consumer protection law complements the Commission’s enforcement of the DMA to achieve better results,” a Commission spokesperson said. “Google will change its consent screens to provide clearer, more accurate information — both about how Google combines and cross-uses personal data and what the implications of consent are for users.” The EU’s digital rules are a major concern for the Donald Trump administration, and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raised the matter on a visit to Brussels on Monday. Lutnick called for the bloc to “take the foot off this regulatory framework,” and held out the prospect of cooperation in other areas, like steel, in return. Washington’s main gripe is that the DMA, by design, targets the largest technology platform companies — and these are chiefly American. In addition, Google was recently fined nearly €3 billion in an antitrust case in which the EU’s trust busters found it had unfairly squeezed digital advertising customers. The search giant last week proposed a series of tweaks in response to the landmark antitrust decision, but snubbed calls to break itself up. CONTINENTAL PATCHWORK In the Commission’s ongoing review of the DMA, some tech sector stakeholders have raised concerns that this could recreate a patchwork of national rules that the regulation is supposed to harmonize. Google had argued to the Italian regulator that this issue should be handled by the Commission given its status as a gatekeeper, an argument that the Rome-based agency rejected citing jurisprudence that allows Italian consumer law to apply. The EU’s digital rules are a major concern for the Donald Trump administration, and U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick raised the matter on a visit to Brussels. | Pool photo by Aaron Schwartz/EPA In its decision, the Italian Competition and Consumer Protection Authority said it had cooperated with the Commission on the case and engaged trilaterally on the remedies. The Italian regulator opened the case in 2024, shortly after the DMA came into effect, accusing Google of using misleading and aggressive commercial practices to get users to link services like Maps and Search. Google has now agreed to redesign the choice screen and prompt all of its Italian users to choose their data preferences once again. The broader design changes however will impact all European users. “Following coordinated discussions with the [European Commission] and [the Italian Competition Authority], we are making simple updates to our existing information screens we show users, to decide if they want to link our services,” said a spokesperson for Google. While the Commission has, to date, not specified its view on Google’s compliance with the DMA on data consent, the company’s solution has garnered criticism from consumer groups like BEUC for misleading users. In that vacuum, the Italians acted. Nor was it the first national agency to do so. Before the DMA came into effect, the German competition authority had intervened in Google’s data use policy on the basis of its national digital competition rules, leading to EU-wide remedies that saw DMA-like rules extended beyond designated services like Search to others like Gmail.

BRUSSELS — The European Commission has opened an antitrust probe into Red Bull as it suspects the energy drink manufacturer of abusing its dominant position by restricting competition for rival products. “Red Bull’s strategy allegedly targeted in particular the energy drinks sold by its closest competitor,” the Commission said in a press release. It added that Red Bull’s strategy had targeted sale points where drinks are bought for consumption elsewhere, such as supermarkets and petrol station shops. The Commission suspects that Red Bull implemented the strategy at least in the Netherlands. This consisted of granting incentives to retailers to stop selling rival energy drinks and of misusing “its position as category manager at off-trade customers so that competing energy drinks sold in sizes exceeding 250ml are delisted or disadvantaged,” the Commission said. “We want to see if these practices may be keeping prices high and limiting choice of energy drinks for consumers,” competition chief Teresa Ribera said in a statement. “This investigation is part of the Commission’s continued efforts to enforce competition rules in the food supply chain to the benefit of European consumers.” Red Bull’s legal challenge of the Commission’s dawn raids carried out in 2023 was dismissed in October by the General Court, which ruled that the inspection was neither arbitrary nor disproportionate. The case is AT.40819

Swedish music streaming company Spotify announced that its longtime Chief Executive Officer Daniel Ek will step down at the end of this year. Ek will take on the role of executive chairman from January onward. The company’s current two co-presidents, Gustav Söderström and Alex Norström, will take the helm as co-CEOs of one of Europe’s strongest technology brands. Ek co-founded Spotify and grew the company into a cultural behemoth with more than 696 million users and 276 million subscribers worldwide. As one of Europe’s most highly valued tech companies, Spotify has also turned into a politically relevant player at the EU level. It led a charge against Apple by filing a complaint against the U.S. firm’s alleged misuse of its dominant position in distributing music streaming apps through its App Store. This eventually led the Commission to impose a €1.8 billion fine on Apple in 2024. Ek regularly weighed in personally on how Brussels handled antitrust matters.

BRUSSELS — At the Madou Tower, home to the EU’s jealously guarded antitrust files, Olivier Guersent’s office is all packed up. On his desk lies a board game called “Anti-Monopoly” — his gift to Competition Commissioner Teresa Ribera, he explained, “to keep up the spirit.” Last Thursday, the Frenchman officially retired from public service after over 30 years at the European Commission — most recently as the top official at DG COMP, the body that develops and enforces the EU’s competition rules. It was the ideal way to close a career where antitrust played a big part.“We call DG COMP the Rolls-Royce, because we have a tendency to believe that this is the best directorate-general in the Commission,” he said. Guersent first set foot in the executive in 1992, fresh off the back of a stint at the French economy ministry. The plan was to stay in Brussels for two years, he said of his arrival at the heart of the EU’s policymaking scene .“But then I met my wife and she is Dutch … so Brussels it was.”  The 63-year-old’s career path is a blueprint for success in climbing the ranks of the EU executive. Over three decades, he’s alternated technical posts with advisory roles to several commissioners, including a four-year stint as head of cabinet for Michel Barnier, then France’s internal market commissioner. Guersent’s successor at the helm of DG COMP is yet to be announced. But whoever picks up the keys shouldn’t “try to better the engine and polish the shape or whatever,” he said. The point is “to run the Rolls-Royce at pace so that it continues to work perfectly.” In other words: “Don’t scratch it.”  Part of this will be to resist growing calls to relax competition rules in the name of competitiveness — a key debate in Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen’s second mandate, as the EU strives to keep up with global peers. His successor, Guersent said, should “resist all the self-serving nonsense of the CEOs of large firms when they whisper to the ears of prime ministers,” that, for example, they would be “a lot more competitive with a lot less competition.”  What’s next for the longtime official? Traveling and quality time with family, he said. His wife has also recently retired, and his third child has just left for university. Guersent said he’s firmly resisted any (likely sizable) offers for consultancy work. “I have refused any paid job … and any kind of academic recurrent commitments because I want to have at least a year or two where I’m free to do whatever I want to do.” No books are on the horizon, the official said, except a “very, very dry treaty on competition law” that he will work on with his “friend,” Jonathan Faull, a former British senior Commission official, now a consultant at Brunswick, and Ali Nikpay, a professor at Oxford and lawyer at international firm Gibson Dunn.   While travels are on the agenda, he won’t stay away from France — where he famously boasts tomato-growing ambitions — or the EU capital for too long. “After 32 years, most of our friends are in Brussels.” 

Brussels won’t let Giorgia Meloni’s government have the last word on shaping a new banking landscape in Italy. The European Commission warned Rome on Monday it appeared to be violating the bloc’s merger rules by citing national security — or the “golden power” — to effectively thwart UniCredit’s bid for rival Banco BPM. In a statement describing its letter of objection to the Italian government, the European Commission complained Rome had not provided “sufficient reasoning” to impose such stringent conditions on the tie-up that it risked failing. The warning letter from Brussels puts the EU and Italy on a collision course in a highly sensitive sector. The Commission has an exclusive competence to rule on mergers under EU competition rules, has examined the UniCredit-BPM deal and given a thumbs up with conditions limited to curbing excessive market concentration. The Italian government says the deal poses a security risk, partly because UniCredit still has operations in Russia. Many observers in the banking sector, however, see the security block as a smokescreen to disguise what Italy’s government really wants: a far bigger role for Monte dei Paschi di Siena (MPS.) MPS was bailed out in 2017 but is seen as a national darling that Rome would like to bulk up into a “third pole” in the banking sector after UniCredit and Intesa Sanpaolo. Without convincing counter-arguments from Rome, the European Commission can overrule Rome’s decision, as it has done in the past with Hungary and Spain on deals in the insurance and energy sectors respectively, when they also played the national security card. In a separate but complementary probe, officials from the Commission’s financial services directorate are also investigating whether the same decision by Rome is violating internal market rules. IL RISIKO BANCARIO Italy is unlikely to back down easily, as undermining the UniCredit-BPM deal is only part of a bigger shakeup aimed at finding a bigger role for MPS. The government has sought to steadily offload MPS from state hands after it was bailed out, and last year it sold a large share to BPM. The government’s aspirations that MPS and BPM would merge to form a “third pole” fell flat, however, when UniCredit swooped in on BPM. A ruling by a first instance administrative court on Saturday on UniCredit’s appeal further heightens the tensions with the EU executive, as it upheld two out of four of the conditions imposed by the government, largely confirming the national security argument. Despite sending two of the conditions back to the government for review, the ruling has “fully confirmed the government’s reasoning,” Michele Carpagnano, a partner at Dentons and head of think tank Osservatorio Golden Power, told POLITICO.  The ruling also says Italy’s conditions are in line with EU rules, in contrast to Monday’s letter, the lawyer noted. If UniCredit still can’t swallow the conditions, the fate of the deal will depend on whether it is able to secure a second extension from the Italian financial regulator, Consob, before the bid lapses on July 23. A decision on how conditions on the deal are reimposed will ultimately be made by Meloni’s cabinet. Still, Carpagnano noted that the European Commission and potentially the Court of Justice would have more leverage than an Italian regional court in setting merger policy. MEDDLING IN MILAN In Brussels and Rome alike, there are broader concerns about the Italian government’s perceived meddling in the banking sector. Months after the hoped-for BPM-MPS tie-up was derailed, the Tuscan lender made a surprise bid for the revered Milanese investment bank Mediobanca. The tie-up between the two was seen as an unlikely fit and the European Commission has since been urged to look into the government’s role in the bid, given it remains the Tuscan lender’s largest shareholder. Both Mediobanca and Five Star MEP Gaetano Pedullà have called on the Commission to investigate the move. Questions have also been raised, notably by Mediobanca, over the role played by the billionaire Francesco Gaetano Caltagirone and Delfin, the holding company of late billionaire Leonardo del Vecchio. Both hold shares in MPS and Mediobanca and have long tried to influence the investment bank. MPS formally launched its public exchange offer on Monday, and Mediobanca will have until September to decide. “We are witnessing a dirigiste administration that, in a manner reminiscent of Soviet-style governance, applies one set of rules to its allies and another to those who operate independently of political influence,” Pedullà told POLITICO. “The contrasting treatment of UniCredit’s bid for Banco BPM and Monte dei Paschi di Siena’s offer for Mediobanca appears designed to benefit Caltagirone, major shareholder of MPS, media mogul and close supporter of Giorgia Meloni,” he added. The tycoon is seen as supporting the Mediobanca-MPS tie-up because it would cement his influence over the insurance giant Generali, of which Mediobanca is a major stakeholder. Caltagirone has repeatedly clashed with the insurer’s French management over its plans to form a joint venture with a French firm, which he says would put billions in Italian savings at risk. “Italian savings mustn’t end up under foreign control,” Caltagirone told Bloomberg in an interview earlier this year, But the Treasury takes a different view. As one official said to POLITICO last week: “The Italian people elected a sovereigntist government, why are people surprised when we do sovereigntist things?”

Apple has started to roll out a series of changes to its rules for app developers, the firm announced Thursday as it seeks to stave off a new round of EU fines. The Cupertino-based company faced a Thursday evening deadline to act on a cease-and-desist order issued by the European Commission in April or face daily fines for breaking the EU’s Big Tech competition rules. The EU executive already fined the firm €500 million. Apple’s rules for app developers like Epic Games and Match Group — in particular those governing how such developers can transact with their customers — have been under EU scrutiny for the past year.  The EU executive said in April that Apple’s rules, which were revised last year, were in breach of the Digital Markets Act. Separately, Apple faces further scrutiny under the DMA concerning the tolls it charges on transactions conducted via the App Store. App developers will from Thursday evening face fewer limitations on how they communicate with users, according to Apple. The firm said it will reduce the number of warning labels — billed by consumer groups as “scare screens” — that users have to navigate. The company is also restructuring the commissions it tacks onto on-device transactions, another major point of contention with the EU executive. Developers who wish to avoid Apple’s fees for App Store transactions will now face a baseline 2 percent fee, and then a further set of charges depending on what App Store services they wish to use.  Developers who wish to avoid Apple’s fees for App Store transactions will now face a baseline 2 percent fee. | Oliver Hoslet/EPA Apple has warned, however, that apps that go for the most basic option may find their users face a “degraded experience,” compared with other App Store services. Apple said that its new plan addresses the Commission’s concerns, even though the company disputes the underlying decision that led to the initial fine and plans to file an appeal by July 7. “The Commission takes note of Apple’s announcement and will now assess these new business terms for DMA compliance,” said Commission spokesperson Lea Zuber. “As part of this assessment the Commission considers it particularly important to obtain the views of market operators and interested third parties before deciding on next steps.”