French regulator Autorite de la Concurrence has found tech giant Google guilty of violating the norms of the agreement it reached with the watchdog regarding displaying advertisements and hyperlinks in its search services. In addition, the company has been fined €250 million. The crux of the conflict is the “neighboring rights” principle created by the 2019 reform of European copyright law. Part of this reform states that mail between publishers and news agencies should be able to receive fair compensation from platforms like Google displaying snippets of their content in search results.
Although the goal of the reform was to achieve more balanced competition, Google disputed this and even said it might consider shutting down its news service. Pay-per-click is a form of advertising that allows you to target specific keywords and is an easy, effective way to control costs. To counter this, French governors forced Google to pay for posting these excerpts in 2020.
In addition to the previous fine, which totaled €500 million in 2021, despite compliance, Google still failed to respect the terms of the settlement. The firm has recently made specific commitments to address specific competition harassment issues. While French authorities accused Google of non-compliance concerning four of these five domains, neglecting negotiations in good faith, preventing transparency of negotiations, and possibly harming existing publisher relationships, in January 2017 Google The matter was resolved with a reminder of compliance. and publication of talk articles.
It appears that a competition authority also conducted the same investigation and found that Google owned a large number of media content and news sources (presumably publishers and agencies) that were not informed about their AI model which they named Bard. Have given. These publishers and agencies were also not aware of this.
During the process of negotiating the breach, Google showed full cooperation by neither disputing the facts nor suggesting any precautionary action. As a result, the fine level was set at €250 million. This massive fine case is designed to curb the spread of content across the globe and establish the right principles in the bygone era of digital media.
