Google fined €500m over use of news content

French authorities fined Google €500m after the search giant failed to follow an order to reach a fair deal with publishers to use their news content on its platform.

The Alphabet unit ignored a 2020 decision to negotiate in good faith for displaying snippets of articles on its Google News service, the Autorité de la Concurrence said Tuesday. The fine is the second-biggest antitrust penalty in France for a single company.

“The sanction ... takes into account the exceptional seriousness of the breaches observed,” said Isabelle de Silva, the president of the French agency.

Google is “very disappointed” with the decision and considers it “acted in good faith throughout the entire process”, a spokesperson said. Google added that it’s about to reach an agreement with Agence France-Presse (AFP that included a global licensing agreement.

Google can appeal the penalty.

The confrontation between Google and newspaper owners and wire services has been a long time coming. European publishers have been pushing regulators for more than a decade to tackle the power of Google, which they say has lured away billions of euros in advertising revenue. Complaints were lodged in France in 2019 by groupings representing newspapers and magazines as well as AFP.

Tuesday’s fine is the latest show of strength by the French regulator as it vies with its EU and German counterparts to be the region’s toughest watchdog of US tech firms.

In recent years, the authority has tended to order behavioural changes before the end of probes, which can drag on for years. While this has spurred other antitrust agencies to emulate the tactic, Google’s defiance risked jeopardising it.

Earlier this year, Google reached a deal to remunerate a grouping of French newspapers, the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Générale. There have also been talks with magazine owners and AFP.

But de Silva said regulators dismissed the remuneration offered by Google as “negligible”. She criticised the tech giant for offering to pay the same amount for press content as it does for dictionary listings or weather information.

As part of Tuesday’s decision, Google was ordered to start negotiations within two months of fresh requests from the plaintiff press publishers or face daily fines reaching as much as €900,000 a day.

Google may risk a further attack in the news case as French regulators are expected to issue a decision on the substance of the case, which may also include fines, at the end of the year.

Silicon Valley firms have been facing close French scrutiny in recent years. Google agreed last month to pay a €220m penalty to settle a probe that struck at the heart of its power over online advertising and it got a €150m fine in 2019 in a case focusing on its Google Ads platform.

The authority’s record €1.1bn was issued in 2020 against Apple after the US firm was criticised for anticompetitive agreements with two distributors over the sale of non-iPhone products such as Apple Mac computers. Apple is appealing the penalty.

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