Alphabet’s Google was fined 500 million euro on Tuesday for failing to follow the order on having a fair deal with France’s news publishers. The fine is believed to be the second-highest antitrust penalty in France.
The tech giant and Facebook are facing criticism and pressure globally to share their revenue with the original news publishers. Earlier, Australia guided the digital platforms to share revenue with local publishers for news content. Now, France is trying to check the giants for use of the news.
Alphabet Inc. displays snippets of articles on its Google News service. In the year 2020 Google was directed to negotiate a fair deal with the country’s publishers. However, the tech company failed to do follow the order according to the Autorité de la.
Google expressed its disappointment in the decision but agreed to comply. The official statement by the tech company said, “Our objective remains the same: we want to turn the page with a definitive agreement. We will take the French Competition Authority’s feedback into consideration and adapt our offers,”.
A spokesperson of Google said, “We have acted in good faith throughout the entire process. The fine ignore our efforts to reach an agreement, and the reality of how news works on our platforms.”
“The sanction of 500 million euros takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the breaches observed.” – Isabelle de Silva, President of the French agency. She added, “When the authority decrees an obligation for a company, it must comply scrupulously, both in the spirit and letter (of the decision). Here, this was unfortunately not the case,”
The competition authority has directed Google to come up with an offer of remuneration for the current use of the copyrighted content to the media publishers. U.S Tech giant will have two months to prepare the new plans of compensation for news publishes. Failing to do so might attract further fines of up to 900,000 euros per day.
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