00:00ChatGPT needs to watch its back because Gemini is now as good, if not better.
00:05Did Google catch up so quickly by playing fair?
00:08European regulators have just launched an investigation to try and answer that question.
00:13So what's the problem?
00:14Google essentially has the whole internet at its fingertips because of a web crawler that it uses to index and create its search results.
00:22Now it's been using that same web crawler to scrape content from websites which it uses to train its AI models.
00:30The problem is that other AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have been paying web publishers and websites for some of the high quality data that they use to train their AI models.
00:42How Google maintains that competitive edge might be unfair to websites who rely on the company to be seen in its search results.
00:49This is a huge dilemma for websites because letting Google take your content is a missed financial opportunity.
00:56But opting out of being scraped by Google's main web crawler also means losing out on tons of traffic.
01:03And website owners have already suffered a drop in traffic because of AI summaries.
01:07There used to be an old joke that the best place to hide a body is the second page of Google's search results.
01:13But who's even looking at the first page anymore when the answer you need is right at the top of the page?
01:19Cloudflare's Matthew Prince actually has a simple fix.
01:23Google should use one crawler for search and one crawler for AI training.
01:28Publishers could then opt out of that second crawler or ask to be compensated.
01:32And website publishers should be able to charge for their work.
01:35But Google will resist anything that forces it to pay for and negotiate for the AI training data that everyone else is having to pay for.
01:44And it's arguing that the EU probe is stifling innovation.
01:48But really, the opposite is true.
01:50This AI boom should be driving a competitive marketplace with hundreds of viable companies.
01:56Instead, it's on track to keep profits within existing giants like Google.
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