Another setback for Google in Europe that could have consequences for other tech giants. Not only is the search giant required to negotiate deals with news publishers to link news to the search engine, it also has to ask them for permission to train its large AI language models on the news they publish the media. These two reasons are what the Competition Authority (ADLC) of France has pointed out to impose a new fine of 250 million euros on Google for infringements of the intellectual property rules of the European Union.
The French regulator pointed out that Google has failed to respect a previous commitment to negotiate agreements in good faith with newspaper publishers in that country and that it has also trained its AI model, which is expressed through the Bard chatbot – now Gemini – with content from the media without having notified the Competition Authority or the publishers in France.
Everything must be in accordance with the so-called related rights, which is what the author’s rights are called that a European directive introduced in 2019. EU regulations establish that the media must receive financial remuneration when their contents are reused on the internet by platforms such as Google.
The French regulator has accused the U.S. company of “breaching four of its seven commitments” made in June 2022, when a long litigation was brought to an end. The ADLC believes that Google did not negotiate “in good faith on the basis of transparent criteria” with press publishers to assess how much it should pay them.
In a statement published on its blog, Google indicated yesterday that it will not appeal against the sanction: “We have compromised because the time has come to turn the page and, as demonstrated by our numerous agreements with publishers, we want to concentrate on long-term approaches deadline to connect internet users with quality content and work constructively with French publishers”. In any case, the company emphasized that “the amount of the fine is disproportionate in relation to the violations detected”.
Google stated that the ADLC “does not sufficiently take into account the efforts” it has undertaken to address its observations “in an environment in which it is very complicated to define a course of action when a precise direction cannot be anticipated” . He explained that “the absence of clear regulatory measures and successive court actions have made negotiations with publishers more complex and have prevented us from calmly considering our future investments in the field of information in France”.
The company recalled that so far it has reached “important licensing agreements for related rights with 280 French press publishers that include more than 450 publications and pay several tens of millions of euros per year”. Google had already been fined by the ADLC for similar reasons with 500 million euros.
In December 2014, Google closed Google News in Spain due to the entry into force of the Intellectual Property law, which provided for the right of news publishers to receive irrevocable financial compensation from the news aggregators who indexed the your information Service returned in 2022.
