★ European Commission: ‘Guidance to Google for AI Interoperability on Android & Sharing of Google Search’

The European Commission, last week : Today, the European Commission has issued two sets of binding specification measures to Google under the Digital Markets Act. The aim of the first specification measures is to ensure that competitors’ Artificial Intelligence (AI) services can compete with Google’s own AI services, such as Gemini, by having equal access to features on Google’s Android devices. The aim of the second specification measures is to rebalance the playing field by giving third-party search engines access to search data that only Google Search can collect at scale. They provide separate “Q&A” overviews of the guidance for Android AI interoperability and web search sharing , and the full guidance documents are PDFs ( Case DMA.100220 for Android AI, Case DMA.100209 for web search). I suggest reading the two Q&A overviews, unless you’re having trouble falling asleep at night, in which case you’ll love the full PDF decisions. Both decisions are interesting. With search, Google is required to share with competitors — search engines and AI chatbots alike — a massive amount of user data from Google Search user interactions. What terms people search for, what they click on in results, what languages and devices they use. It’s all ostensibly anonymized but that’s tricky when it comes to search terms. A lot of the terms people type into web search fields are to some degree personally identifying. The EC seems to be saying it’s Google’s problem to filter out things like passwords and usernames and omit them from the shared datasets.