French Authorities Fine Google 500 million euros Over News Copyright

On Tuesday, Google got fined for failing to comply with temporary orders that France’s antitrust watchdog had given the company. The U.S. tech company was fined 500 million euros ($593 million) by France’s regulator for not complying with the orders it had given in a row with French news publishers.

This is not the first time that Search engine giant Google has been faced with fines or regulatory actions from regulators around the world. Last month, Google was fined 220 million euros ($268m) by France’s antitrust watchdog for abusing its market dominance in online advertising. According to what the French Competition Authority said, Google’s advertising practices were detrimental to competitors and publishers of mobile websites and applications.

In its most recent brawl with the French antitrust watchdog, Google has been given the next two weeks to design a proposal on how it plans to provide compensation for publishers and news agencies for the use of their content. Failure to do this would incur additional fines of up to 900,000 euros per day.

Google mentioned that it was very disappointed with the decision and according to the company’s spokesperson “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. To date, Google is the only company to have announced agreements on neighbouring rights.”

Google has also been accused of failing to have come to a resolution for the remuneration of news content online  by French news publishers APIG, SEPM, and AFP.

Talking about the development, the antitrust body’s chief; Isabelle de Silva, said in a statement that “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”.