Google is fined $272 million by a French regulator over a media licensing agreement.
Google was penalized 250 million euros ($272 million) by France’s antitrust authorities for breaking agreements it had with media businesses about content licensing.
In response to a 2019 lawsuit filed by organizations representing French periodicals and newspapers against the American tech giant and other online platforms, the French Competition Authority said on Wednesday that it was imposing the penalties in addition to other sanctions. The internet corporations were accused by the media outlets of generating billions of dollars from their content without paying the people who created it.
The authority punished Google 500 million euros ($592 million) in 2021 for not engaging in good faith negotiations. When the business decided not to appeal the punishment in 2022, it seemed that the disagreement had been settled.
However, the authority said in its statement on Wednesday that Google had broken four of the seven provisions of the settlement, including the agreements to conduct conversations with publishers in “good faith” and to provide transparent information.
The internet titan said it accepted the settlement “because it is time to move on,” adding, “We want to focus on the larger goal of sustainable approaches to connecting people with quality content and working constructively with French publishers.”
It termed the punishment excessive and said the watchdog had not fully taken into consideration its efforts an environment where it’s very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next.
The European Union’s regulatory framework which attempts to provide necessary conditions for balanced negotiations between press agencies, publishers and digital platforms has been the subject of four rulings against Google in as many years.
France has served as a test example for the guidelines and after some early reluctance Google and Facebook have both agreed to pay certain French media for stories that appear in web searches.
The New York Times sued Microsoft, a competitor of Google and OpenAI, the company behind the well-known artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT in 2023, claiming that they had improperly used millions of the newspaper’s stories to train chatbots.
Because Google is suspected of engaging in anti-competitive behavior that affects press outlets and news agencies, Spain’s competition authority opened an inquiry against the company last year. After Google made “important adjustments” to allay competition concerns, the internet giant halted a probe into its News Showcase service in 2022.
