Competition enforcers must prevent dominant technology companies from acquiring disruptive technology arising from artificial intelligence, a senior official at the European Commission has said.
Alberto Bacchiega, who will head the directorate responsible for enforcing the EU’s Digital Markets Act within the European Commission’s competition arm, said there is a big “danger” that companies with market power acquire potentially disruptive technology and integrate it into their ecosystems. He spoke in a personal capacity yesterday at the American Bar Association’s antitrust spring meeting.
In response to a question from the floor asking whether new AI technologies could disrupt or concentrate existing market power, Bacchiega said he “won’t pretend to know the answer”. However, dominant tech companies have previously taken over potential disruptors “and the disruptive potential is actually turned into something fully compatible with the ecosystem”, he added.
“That’s the real danger we have and what we have to work to avoid,” Bacchiega said.
Open AI launched its ChatGPT chatbot in November, which allows users to have human-like conversations with the app. The platform uses vast amounts of data from books, articles and websites to provide responses to questions.
Following the popularity of ChatGPT, Google and Microsoft announced their own AI chatbots, with the latter integrating the technology into its search platform Bing.
Yesterday, Bacchiega said a lot will depend on how this new technology develops. “Technology can be disruptive and can change the game that can make whatever the market power of today irrelevant tomorrow.”
He noted that he has seen little evidence of so-called killer acquisitions from his time at the commission, where a dominant tech company acquires an innovative business but kills its product line.
Speaking on the same panel, Anant Raut, the former global head of competition policy at Meta, said he doesn’t think AI is going to be “as disruptive as everyone assumes”.
“Right now it just spews stuff but it is not sentient,” he said.
He noted how AI is a hot topic at this year’s conference but this can change very quickly.
“Last year it was NFTs [non-fungible tokens] – think about how many billable hours were collectively wasted in this room writing client alerts,” he said.
However, Raut predicted that tech companies will play “catch up” in the AI space, which presents competition concerns around acquisitions.
Daniel Guarnera, counsel to the assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, and James Lloyd, antitrust chief at the Texas Attorney General’s office, also spoke on the panel. Tara Koslov, deputy director at the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Competition, moderated the discussion.
