MILANO – Maxi-fine for Google in France: the French Competition Authority issued a half-billion euro fine to the American web search giant, arguing that the US company did not negotiate “in good faith” with the publishers of the press with respect to the application of so-called related rights. Google will also have to “submit a remuneration offer for the current use of protected content” from publishers and news agencies, if it does not want to incur other mega-sanctions. For the moment, the US company has announced that the fine does not reflect the “efforts made” to reach a solution.
While at the international level progress is being made to tax large multinationals (in particular the web) in a coordinated way, and the agreements in the OECD and G20 headquarters have led the EU itself to freeze the proposal for a community digital tax, Alphabet (the holding company of the search engine) ended up under accusation by Paris for having ignored a decision last year that required, in fact, to find a fair remuneration for the resumption of editorial content on the Google News portal, where the summaries of the articles appear. A path that Australia had already taken towards Facebook and Google itself, asking for the remuneration of local publishers.
Copyright, now Google pays French publishers. Agreement with Le Monde, Libération, Le Figaro
by our correspondent Anais Ginori
Google’s reaction was marked by “great disappointment” at the decision, while the American company says it acted “in good faith” in handling the case. A spokesperson added that it is also close to an agreement with Agence France-Presse on a global scale.
Google, agreement in France for the remuneration of newspapers. Clash in Australia: we close there
For the French Authority, which – as he points out Bloomberg – it is carving out a role as the toughest ‘watchdog’ of the behavior of large American tech companies in the Old Continent – the problem is that the remuneration agreements of French publishing groups have hitherto been based on prices of “negligible” value. . According to the Authority, the tariff for the press articles would have been comparable to that of the information on the time or on the words in the dictionary.
Now the Antitrust Authority has required Google to submit an offer of compensation for the current uses of their protected content to the publishers and news agencies that have contacted the Authority within two months and to provide them with the information necessary for the evaluation of this offer. Otherwise, Google may be subject to periodic penalties of up to € 900,000 for each day of delay.
The president of the Authority, Isabelle de Silva, commented: “When the Authority imposes injunctions on companies, they are required to apply them scrupulously, respecting their letter and spirit. In this case, unfortunately this was not the case. . Following an in-depth investigation, the Authority found that Google had not complied with several injunctions issued in April 2020. First, Google’s negotiations with publishers and news agencies cannot be considered conducted in good faith, in which Google required that discussions necessarily take place under a new partnership, called Publisher Curated News, which included a new service called Showcase. ” “By doing so – he continued -, Google refused, as has been repeatedly asked, to have a specific discussion on the compensation due for the current uses of content protected by related rights”.
According to the president of the French Antitrust, moreover, “these violations were aggravated by the failure to transmit information that would have allowed fair negotiation, and by the violation of the obligations aimed at guaranteeing the neutrality of the negotiation with respect to the display of protected content and economic relations existing from elsewhere between Google and publishers and news agencies. “
For its part, Google responded to the Antitrust decision through a spokesperson: “We are very disappointed with this decision: we acted in good faith throughout the process – the official reaction – The fine ignores our efforts to reach a agreement and ignores the reality of how news works on our platforms. To date, Google is the only company to have announced agreements on related rights. We are also about to finalize an agreement with the AFP (Agence France-Presse) which includes a global licensing agreement, as well as the remuneration of related rights for their journalistic publications. “
.