Google will have to pay a fine of €250 million in France for failing to comply with the agreements made in 2022 with the Autorité de la Concurrence on so-called related rights, regulated by the European directive of April 2019 (copyright reform) to ensure balanced negotiation between publishers, news agencies and digital platforms.
“The European Directive of 17 April 2019 sets out a fairer framework for the conditions for negotiating royalties for press actors related to the publication of content online. In particular, the European copyright reform requires search engines to pay publishers for snippets displayed in result previews. Google had come out against it in defense of the quality of the news, even threatening the closure of News. In a countermove, Google had in fact asked publishers for permission to publish the snippets for free – without any compensation – threatening to remove them from search results. In April 2020, French antitrust forced the Mountain View company to pay publishers and websites for displaying such snippets.”
The urgent measures that obliged Google to comply with the European directive were not complied with, leading to a fine of 500 million euros in the summer of 2021 and a sentence to comply with the injunctions. The following year, the French Authority “accepted, for a period of 5 years renewable once, the commitments proposed by Google to put an end to the concerns expressed in relation to competition”. The decision taken today sanctions the American company “for having failed to comply with its commitment to cooperation” with the authority itself and “for failing to comply with four of its seven commitments”, namely:
“conduct negotiations in good faith, on the basis of transparent, objective and non-discriminatory criteria within three months (commitments 1 and 4)
to provide publishers or news agencies with the information necessary for the transparent assessment of their remuneration in the context of related rights (commitment 2)
take the necessary measures to ensure that the negotiations do not jeopardise other existing economic relations between Google and publishers or news agencies (commitment 6)”
The fine imposed on Google also concerns Bard: the Competition Authority found “the use of content from publishers and news agencies for the purpose of forming the model, without notifying them or the Authority”.
The total fine was set at €250 million considering Google’s commitment not to contest the facts and to put in place a series of corrective measures.