Opinion: The Case for Vigilance in AI Markets
Stacey Dogan is a Professor of Law and an affiliated faculty member in Boston University's Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences. She writes that antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe are right to investigate Big Tech-AI partnerships. Even if AI markets remain competitive today, history and economics show that the Big Tech companies will push to monopolize segments of the AI market if given the opportunity. The investigations serve as a deterrent against anticompetitive behavior and give the regulators access to the knowledge and information that will be necessary to detect anticompetitive patterns as the AI market matures.
Excerpt from ProMarket: Antitrust authorities in the United States and around the world have expressed keen interest in the growing web of relationships between dominant tech firms and artificial intelligence (AI) developers. The relationships have come fast and furiously, accompanied by hefty price tags and dressed up in a variety of transactional forms. The firms present the deals as innovation and efficiency-enhancing and characterize the AI marketplace as highly competitive.
Regulators appear unconvinced. While we have yet to see a formal challenge to any of these deals, competition authorities in the U.S., European Union, United Kingdom, and elsewhere have taken a position of active vigilance. Through information requests, investigations, opinions, policy statements, and public comments, regulators have made clear that they will not sit on the sidelines as the firms jockey for dominant positions in these evolving markets. Instead, regulators will evaluate deals as they happen, with the goal of responding nimbly to those that are likely to have anticompetitive effects.