France’s competition regulator fined Google 500 million euros ($592 million) on Tuesday for neglecting to haggle in accordance with some basic honesty with French publishers in an argument about payments for their news.
The agency will impose further fines of 900,000 euros (around $1 million) every day if Google refuse to propose within two months on how it will remunerate publishers and news agencies for their contents.
Google France said in a statement it was “exceptionally disillusioned” by the decision, and that the fine “doesn’t mirror the efforts put up or the truth as regards the utilization of news content on our platform.” It said it is haggling in accordance with some basic honesty toward an answer, and that it’s nearing agreement with certain publishers.
The question is essential for a bigger exertion by experts in the European Union and globally to drive Google and other tech companies to compensate publishers for content.
The French antitrust agency had given transitory orders to Google in April 2020 to hold talks within 90 days with news publishers, and fined the company Tuesday for violating those orders.
“When the authority imposes orders on companies, they are required to apply them conscientiously, regarding their letter and their soul. In the current case, this was tragically not the situation,” the watch dog’s president, Isabelle de Silva, said in an explanation.
“Google’s discussions with publishers and press agencies can’t be viewed as having been done in accordance with some basic honesty.”
The company had to haggle with French publishers following a court order last year maintained a request saying such arrangements were needed by a 2019 European Union copyright mandate. France was the first of the coalition’s 27 countries to receive the order, which spreads out a way for publishers and news agencies to agree licensing deals with online platforms.
Google had at first dismissed paying for news, saying news agencies profited with the large numbers of readers it sends off to their sites. News agencies, in the mean time, have been requesting for some time that digital giants pay for news content they get from business media while taking the overwhelming majority of advertisement income.
In Tuesday’s decision, the watch dog zeroed in on a couple of explicit infringement of its orders by Google. It said the company pushed news publishers to arrange bargains for its News Exhibit item, which allows publishers to bundle stories with boards and highlights like courses of events, while barring pay from general search results. Google additionally revealed to French news oagencies including AFP they couldn’t seek after payments if their substance showed up on other news sites and came up in search results.
In Australia, Google and Facebook have signed licensing deals with news agencies after the government passed a law this year requiring digital giants to help pay for reporting.
Google has been more than once focused on by French and European Union antitrust experts for different business exercises seen as manhandling its market predominance, including a 220 million euro fine that the French competition watch dog imposed on the company last month for mishandling its dominant position in the online advertising business.
