Benoît Cœuré is the president of the Competition Authority, which issued an opinion in June on the artificial intelligence (AI) sector. The regulator warns, like its counterparts in Washington or Brussels, of the risk that giants such as Google, Microsoft, Meta or Amazon will use their digital strength to crush this market and its start-ups.
The Competition Authority is also, Mr. Cœuré stresses, ” quite “ ready to intervene if necessary in negotiations between AI manufacturers and content producers, while initial agreements have been reached between OpenAI and News Corp (The Wall Street Journal…), Hurry (The Country…) or, in France, The world.
How does AI pose a competition problem?
Like all digital technologies, generative AI raises concerns about competition, because it involves a logic of concentration and accumulation. The more data we have or the more users we have, the more we can innovate. After an initial phase of profusion of initiatives, we have often seen, in these sectors, a phase of consolidation until only a few players remain, or even just one. They then risk excluding their competitors or imposing unfair conditions on their customers and suppliers. They build a fortress or a walled garden.
Why are digital giants like Google, Microsoft and Meta at risk of dominating AI?
Because the production of generative AI depends on inputs that are data, computing capacity (i.e. processors) and talent. Its distribution is based, for companies, on online cloud service platforms. [l’informatique dématérialisée] and, for individuals, in mobile environments, search engines, social networks, etc.
However, today, a handful of companies, most of them American, already have a very strong position in all these areas. This is a new situation. AI is the first technology that will be immediately dominated by large players. Typically, a disruptive innovation carries with it the promise of replacing technologies and ending the rents of existing players. Thus, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Netflix were, initially, small players who had a brilliant idea. In AI, of course, there is the power of ideas, among smaller players such as OpenAI or Mistral AI. But regulators fear that, very quickly, these will be used to strengthen the power of the major players.
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