Google could face changes to search in the UK as regulators crack down
Cheng Xin | Getty Images
Google could face changes to its online search services in the U.K. after regulators raised concerns over the tech giant’s dominance.
The Competition and Markets Authority on Tuesday said it is consulting on a proposal to give Google “strategic market status,” a designation under new competition rules for tech firms that hold entrenched power in a certain market.
The watchdog was granted expanded competition and merger control powers this year as the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act came into force.
Similar to a European Union law known as the Digital Markets Act, the legislation gives the CMA the ability to directly enforce consumer protections on tech giants and take action — including fines of up to 10% of global annual revenues for breaches.
The CMA laid out a roadmap of measures for Google if its strategic market status designation is successful, including:
- Choice screens to help people easily select and switch between search services
- Fair and non-discriminatory search rankings
- Control over how publishers’ content is used — including for artificial intelligence-generated responses
- Portability of consumer search data to support product innovation
In response to the CMA’s decision, Google on Tuesday said the outcome of such changes “could have significant implications for businesses and consumers” in the U.K.
“The CMA has today reiterated that ‘strategic market status’ does not imply that anti-competitive behaviour has taken place — yet this announcement presents clear challenges to critical areas of our business in the UK,” Oliver Bethell, Google’s senior director for competition, said in a statement.
“We’re concerned that the scope of the CMA’s considerations remains broad and unfocused, with a range of interventions being considered before any evidence has been provided.”
Bethell added that Google plans to “continue working constructively with the CMA” to avoid such measures from being imposed.
It comes as regulators around the world have increasingly been looking to rein in Big Tech players over their significant market power.
In April, a U.S. judge ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies in two markets for online advertising technology, paving the way for antitrust prosecutors to seek a breakup of its ad products.
Meanwhile, an advisor to the European Union’s top court last week recommended it dismiss Google’s appeal against a record 4.1-billion-euro ($4.8 billion) antitrust fine.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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