France’s Competition Authority has fined Google $593 million for allegedly failing to comply with orders the regulator had given in a row with the country’s news publishers. According to the French regulator, Google violated its April 2020 orders to negotiate paid deals with news publishers and for publishers’ right to show snippets of their content in its search results.
News publishers Alliance de la presse d’information generale (APIG), Syndicat des éditeurs de la presse magazine (SEPM) and Agence France-Presse (AFP) accused Google of having failed to open talks in good faith with them to find common ground for the remuneration of news content online. Google has since reached paid deals with some French news publishers, such as Le Monde and Le Figaro, but not with others including AFP.
The regulator has asked the tech behemoth to come up with proposals within the next two months on how it would compensate news agencies and other publishers for the use of their news. In the absence of which, the company would face additional fines of up to $1 million per day.
