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Google fined €500 million in France over bad faith negotiations with news outlets:
Google is being fined €500 million by France's Competition Authority over bad faith negotiations with news publishers, CNBC reports. Google agreed to comply with France's orders in January in order to get French publishers to participate in its News Showcase product.
Google is accused of failing to negotiate in good faith with news publishers.
France was one of the first European nations to put into action the EU Copyright Directive, which came into force in 2019 and allows publishers to request remuneration for displaying their content. Last year, the country told Google it must negotiate licensing fees with publishers or face penalties. But a coalition of French news publishers complained to the competition authority that the company was not following orders.
"We hoped that the negotiation would be fruitful and that the actors would play the game. Google still does not seem to accept the law as it was voted, but it is not up to an actor, even a dominant one, to rewrite the law," the authority's president, Isabelle de Silva, told Politico.
See also: Google hit with record $593 million fine in France in news copyright battle and https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/13/google-fined-592m-in-france-for-breaching-antitrust-order-to-negotiate-news-copyright-fees/
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Thursday July 15 2021, @07:55AM (12 children)
Make them feel it in the wallet: It's probably more nuanced strategically but I would think that having Google just pull the plug on said French sites for a few days or weeks would get the message across, perhaps enough to get France and then the EU to back track on the legislation.
It's not Google's job to keep failed business models from last century afloat. Furthermore, while M$ and its partners did succeed in riling up the public, and the administration, against Google, the real target of this legislation would be all the small, medium, and large sized businesses. Whether based in Europe or just operating in Europe, only the largest of the large have the sums of money and pools of staff necessary to even begin considering complying with this bizarre European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market [tomshardware.com]. Though it is a unfortunate as it is bizarre, it is well thought out: Google takes the heat while M$ reaps the benefits and all the small, medium, and large competiors are culled from the market.
We'll see more of this in other EU countries very soon because the European Union Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and there was only a 24-month grace period for the EU member states to begin compliance with the law.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 15 2021, @09:26AM (2 children)
And here we have a zealot from the Leibstandarte Silicon Valley in all their nazi american dishonour, promoting fascism, law breaking for profit etc etc, with no thought to being a decent human being, and upholding the standards that any decent human being would hold themselves to. Watch as he's joined by his fellow nazis, such as Khallow for example.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Thursday July 15 2021, @10:05AM (1 child)
'scuse me, have you read the law that was used to justify that levy on Google?
Could you please do and check back?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 15 2021, @10:14AM
Those are fair and bona fide negotiation by any law, right?
(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday July 15 2021, @10:11AM (6 children)
Yes, because a strictly news aggregator/indexer is so hard to come by, right?
Like the news from some hundred to few thousands of websites in the entire Europe, keeping the index for one month back. Very hard, indeed.
Granted, there will be a lesson in there, both for the newspapers and for Google too. But the newspapers have a lot less to lose than Google.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 15 2021, @02:05PM (5 children)
It's not clear which has less to lose. E.g. if Google were to decide to leave the French market, that would open a space for a competitor. I think France alone is large enough to support a search engine & news aggregator, since those started appearing about 1990, perhaps earlier.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday July 15 2021, @03:34PM (2 children)
if Google were to decide to leave the French market, that would open a space for a competitor.
1) Google doesn't really have any independent competitors that are big enough to step up except maybe Facebook. 2) Even if Google did have such competitors, they would have to have enough spare income to pay the hefty fees France (and then Germany, and then Italy, and then Netherland, and a score more like them) will demand. No new company would have that sum handy, let alone be able to fork it over in each EU member state. The price would break them, which is one of the goals. These policiticans might say they are doing something for their own countries, they may say they are doing something against "Big Tech", but at the end of the day they are clearing the web of all but the smallest handful of the very largest of monopolies.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by BK on Thursday July 15 2021, @07:22PM
It seems to me that it would be advantageous for Google (etc.) to temporarily withdraw and then let a hypothetical small player be the one to negotiate a compensation package first. That first deal might then drive the cost of the future ones...
Maybe link every search for french news here [wikipedia.org] for a week.
...but you HAVE heard of me.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday July 15 2021, @08:33PM
Yes, there currently aren't any real competitors to Google. But if it were to disappear from a large enough market, one would develop. It might take a few years, but not many.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by jb on Friday July 16 2021, @04:09AM (1 child)
Whatever happened to voila.fr?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday July 16 2021, @03:20PM
I don't know, but if it's a search engine, it was in competition with Google, so it wasn't "France alone".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 15 2021, @11:25AM
When the 'business' in question is a key element of our corrupt system of government -- providing propaganda and hatchet jobs alike for the powerful -- they can make it Google's job.
Google's worst mistake was to create Google News in the first place. It's creation accelerated the mediafication of the internet, and Google themselves consistently promoted SEO manipulating news sites over other content links. It was a bad mistake and has dragged the internet into the hands of traditional publishers. We are all paying the price, and while it's nice to see Google paying some of it, the truth is Google and Alphabet are now simply part of the same corrupt mass of insiders and special interests who have begun to treat the whole internet as a private publishers club and are getting away with it.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 16 2021, @12:29AM
Or they could just stop pinching content. Displaying the entire article is not returning a search result, it is copyright infringement.