A Year of Examining How to Prevent Big Tech From Controlling the Future of AI
As artificial intelligence continues to dominate policy agendas, the Open Markets Institute and the Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets have work closely with our partners around the world to fully understand the AI landscape, examine deal-making between AI developers and Big Tech, and present policymakers with our research and options for generating greater competition in AI and ensuring it works for the public good.
We've spread the word that the AI age doesn’t have to look like the corporation-controlled digital age if we take action and use many of the competition policy tools already at regulators’ disposal.
Last November, we worked with the AI Now Institute to convene policymakers, technologists, journalists, academics, lawyers and activists for a solutions-oriented discussion on the opportunities and challenges presented by the rise of large-scale artificial intelligence. Our titular report, “AI in the Public Interest,” dug into consolidation up and down the AI tech stack and ways to use competition policy to prevent a handful of tech giants from leveraging their existing dominance to control AI (view a presentation of the report here).
Below we share several important pieces from this year's body of work on AI. You can find even more on our website under Artificial Intelligence.
Using Competition Policy to Keep Artificial Intelligence Open for All
Last month, the Open Markets Institute and Mozilla published a comprehensive report titled "Stopping Big Tech from Becoming Big AI: A Roadmap for Using Competition Policy to Keep Artificial Intelligence Open for All.” The report, authored by Open Markets Transatlantic Partnerships Director Max von Thun and Senior Legal Analyst Daniel Hanley, describes the key threats to competition in AI, including exclusive partnerships, self-preferencing, and the control of essential inputs like computing power.
We call on regulators to act quickly, using existing tools from competition policy to block anti-competitive mergers, nullify restrictive partnerships, break up dominant gatekeepers, and impose rules that guarantee fair access to AI technologies.
Earlier this year, Open Markets and our partners in Europe made a joint submission to the European Commission with similar recommendations for advancing competition in generative AI.
Dismantling AI Data Monopolies Before it’s Too Late
Access to vast troves of data is a critical component of tech giants’ market power over AI, Center for Journalism and Liberty at Open Markets Director Dr. Courtney C. Radsch wrote in an in depth piece for Tech Policy Press this October. Big tech’s dominance over the data they have scraped as well as proprietary datasets has “created huge barriers to entry for newcomers to the AI market or those who want to play fair,” Dr. Radsch wrote.
Her piece also presents regulatory solutions: “investigate many aspects of these emerging data monopolies, and act swiftly to ensure that anticompetitive conduct and privacy violating practices do not further empower dominant players or entrench problematic data collection practices.”
Compensating Creators for the Content Upon Which AI Depends
In “AI Needs Us More Than We Need It,” for the November/December 2024 issue of The Washington Monthly, Dr. Radsch wrote about the urgent need to ensure human content creators are fairly compensated for their work used to train AI models.
She also published an expert brief for Open Markets, “A Framework for Establishing Journalism’s Value in Artificial Intelligence Systems,” examining how we can use frameworks for assigning value to the news content used by large language models to fairly compensate publishers and creators. Such frameworks and related principles for fair compensation have been widely accepted by policymakers, journalists, publishers, and other experts as a solution for fair compensation from the tech platforms that derive tremendous value from news content.
Dr. Radsch also spoke to the necessity of valuing the news in the AI age at the International Press Institute’s World Congress in Sarajevo in May, in an analysis for Brookings where she is a nonresident fellow, and in Nieman Reports. She has briefed policymakers, publishers, and other interested parties in the U.S., UK, Canada, Brazil, South Africa, and Europe.
Coming Up: Competition in the Cloud
Open Markets journalists, legal analysts, and researchers are working to develop solutions for making cloud computing platforms fairer, more accessible, and less controlled by just a handful of powerful tech giants. Just three big tech companies have immense control over the cloud and often use extractive terms, fees, and unfair methods of competition to weaken their competitors and new entrants.
In Competition Policy International this March, Dr. Radsch and Open Markets Senior Reporter and Researcher Karina Montoya examined how public interest investigative journalism is threatened by corporate control over the cloud. We also covered the cloud issues in our 2023 “AI in the Public Interest” report and during an expert panel discussion at our June 2024 conference, “Fixing the Information Crisis Before It's Too Late (For Democracy).” We will have more to share in the months ahead.
Keep up with our latest work in AI by signing up for our newsletter, The Corner, here.