OpenAI seemingly complains about Apple, Google, Microsoft to EU antitrust regulators – report
This may become quite interesting.
Bloomberg claims OpenAI has gone to Europe’s antitrust regulators to complain about Apple, and also Microsoft and Alphabet/Google. It looks as if OpenAI wants regulators to force competitors to open up their systems, arguing that “access to key data is essential” to maintain competition in the AI market.
Complaint relates to Apple, Microsoft, Google
While OpenAI hasn’t been specific about its complaints, and regulators aren’t saying much, it comes down to the old original open beats closed argument we’ve heard before when companies attempt to build their new business on the bones of the new.
The argument is always convincing for a while. Google used it with Android, and yet, flash forward to today and Open AI is using the argument against Google. It’s funny how the barriers to entry mutate.
It’s a gatekeeper thing
Beyond this, OpenAI is also thought to be complaining about distribution bottlenecks. “As more people adopt AI, Google continues to dictate terms around access to data and create distribution bottlenecks, including access to prime real estate on mobile devices, browsers, and at the top of its search results,” the company said recently.
It points to how Android and search agreements block distribution channels and lock out rival AI assistants, while the data Google gathers also gives it an advantage in AI.
I don’t know, but rather suspect, OpenAI is also chasing to force Apple to make more of our own user data available to third parties, even if we don’t want to make it so available.
That doesn’t matter too much to OpenAI. It just wants to ensure that others in the space can’t use their market size to prevent it growing to be an even bigger competitor than they are.
“Allowing an incumbent to dictate the terms of distribution, data access, and interoperability will smother the next wave of new tech breakthroughs and squash their disruptive potential to offer many more competitive options and whole new paradigms.”
Where to next?
It’s hard to speculate at this point, but it does look rather as if when setting up Apple devices we’ll eventually need to be given a choice of whether we want to share our data with third parties or not.
I suspect, but don’t know, that any opposition to the kind of regulation we see emerge in response to the OpenAI complaint will relate to that, to some extension of GDPR which gives people the right to choose to stay within our chosen brand of safe zone. Perhaps it is time people had a say in the outcomes of these things, as well as corporations.
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