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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: 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.