Google fined €500 million in France over dangerous religion negotiations with information retailers

Google is being charged with a historic €500 million ($589 million) fine from the French Competition Authority (FCA) for failing to adjust to an April 2020 order to barter pretty with information publishers over the usage of, and fee for, their articles and different content material (via CNBC).

News publishers gained the power to request fee for the usage of their content material on third-party platforms with the passage of the European Union’s controversial Copyright Directive, which was adopted by France in 2019 and customarily tries to shift energy towards content material producers reasonably than the platforms that reshare their work. Article 11 of the directive, colloquially referred to as the “Link Tax,” offers publishers the appropriate to ask for fee for snippets of articles and different content material linked in locations like Google News.

In the lead-up to the passage of the directive, Google tested blank content previews and no search descriptions as a type of imprecise menace of what it could be pressured to do in a post-Article 11 world. The FCA considered that as an abuse of Google’s monopoly on search and ordered the corporate to adjust to the principles and really negotiate for the appropriate to show articles. Apparently, these negotiations haven’t gone nicely.

According to the FCA, Google pressured its offers with publishers to be centered on News Showcase, a product that doesn’t embody all of the locations publishers’ articles can seem throughout Google’s platforms. Secondly, the FCA claims the corporate isn’t keen to barter sharing income from the adverts bought towards different locations writer content material may seem, just like the hyperlinks and search description you see if you pull up search outcomes. Both points have been presupposed to be addressed within the FCA’s big-picture order to barter “the remuneration due to [publishers] under the Neighbouring Rights Act for the resumption of their protected content,” however it appears Google didn’t see it that means.

In response to information of the nice, Google tells CNBC that it was truly about to finalize an settlement with the Agence France-Presse (AFP), France’s cooperative information wire group, “that includes a global licensing agreement, as well as the remuneration of their Neighbouring Rights for their press publications.” It looks as if that is extra than simply a difficulty of poor timing, however no less than on this assertion supplied to The Verge, Google is sticking to its weapons — and claiming it doesn’t make a lot cash from information search ends in the primary place:

While we’re dedicated to complying with the Copyright Directive and the FCA’s orders, this nice ignores the numerous efforts we’ve made to succeed in agreements and the truth of how information works on our platforms: Google final yr generated lower than 5 million Euros in revenue-not-profit from clicks on adverts towards attainable news-related queries in France. We need to discover a resolution and attain definitive agreements however this nice is out of all proportion to the amount of cash we make from information and we will likely be reviewing the choice intimately.

Google has two months to deal with the problems raised by the FCA by providing funds for the usage of “protected content” to publishers. If it doesn’t, it faces an extra €900,00 ($1 million) per day in penalties on prime of its already multimillion-dollar nice.