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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: 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.