France fines Google another €250 million for insufficient payments to local media

The French antitrust authority fined Google €250 million for failing to fulfill obligations assumed by the American corporation in June 2022 as part of a legal dispute with local publishers and media. We are talking about non-compliance with the law on related rights, adopted in France back in 2019 and obliging Internet companies to pay compensation to media and publishing houses for the use of their content.

In April 2020, the regulator took the first emergency measures against Google in the form of a ban on certain actions. Considering that the American company did not comply with the conditions prescribed by the regulator, the antitrust department fined Google in 2021 by €500 million.

In June 2022, the regulator announced, which terminates all legal proceedings against Google related to violations of related rights of news agencies and the media. The regulator considered the obligations assumed by Alphabet, Google LLC, Google Ireland and Google France sufficient to terminate the proceedings.

However, the antitrust department has now ruled that Google has fallen behind on four of the seven commitments it made in June 2022. The regulator found that the corporation’s payments to publishers were insufficient, given the indirect income Google receives from posting media content in its search engine.

Separately, the antitrust regulator ruled that the chatbot Gemini (originally Bard), launched by Google in July 2023, was trained on content from publishers. At the same time, the corporation did not notify either the media or the authorities about this. Moreover, the corporation, the regulator notes, did not provide publishers with the technical ability to block the chatbot’s access to restricted media content so that this did not affect the display of their materials on other Google services. Thus, the company limited the ability of media and publishing houses to negotiate compensation payments, the regulator concluded.

Google previously agreed not to challenge the regulator’s decisions in this case and has now pledged to make the necessary adjustments to its work.

Kirill Sarkhanyants