French Competition Authority imposes €250M fine on Google for non-compliance with its commitments: Know more

The French competition authority, known as the Autorité de la concurrence, on Wednesday, March 20, issued a fine against Alphabet Inc, Google LLC, Google Ireland Ltd, and Google France. 

The companies have been collectively fined €250M due to their failure to comply with certain commitments established in June 2022.

This fine marks the fourth decision made against Google in four years. 

The context

The issue originated from the French law concerning related rights enacted on July 24, 2019. 

This law, which transposed the EU directive on copyright and related rights of April 17, 2019, 

was designed to facilitate balanced negotiations between press agencies, publishers, and digital platforms.

The French law aimed to rebalance the sharing of value between these entities in favor of the press sector. 

This legislative move was a response to the significant changes affecting the press sector over several years. 

The growth of digital audiences and the decline in print circulation have led to a significant portion of advertising value being held by major digital platforms.

Initially, the Autorité ruled in April 2020 that Google must comply with interim measures in the form of injunctions. When Google failed to meet these requirements, it received a €500M fine in July 2021.

In June 2022, Autorité accepted Google’s commitment to ease the competition concerns for five years, renewable once. As part of this agreement, Accuracy was appointed as a monitoring trustee to oversee Google’s compliance with its commitments.

Breach of commitments

The Autorité has now sanctioned Google for failing to cooperate with the monitoring trustee and for not honoring four out of its seven commitments. These commitments were designed to ensure the following principles:

• negotiate in good faith, based on transparent, objective, and non-discriminatory criteria, within three months (Commitments 1 and 4);
• provide press agencies and publishers with the information needed to transparently assess their remuneration for related rights (Commitment 2);
• take the necessary measures to ensure that negotiations do not affect other economic relationships between Google and press agencies and publishers (Commitment 6).

The Google Bard angle

The Autorité noted that Google’s artificial intelligence service, “Bard”, launched in July 2023, had used content from press agencies and publishers to train its foundation model.

Google did not inform the press agencies or the Autorité about its use of their content. 

This situation became even more complicated when Google connected the use of this content with the display of protected content without offering a technical solution. 

This lack of solution made it difficult for press agencies and publishers to negotiate compensation.

As a result of these breaches, Autorité has imposed a fine of €250M on Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Ltd, and Google France. 

Google, having chosen not to contest the facts, was able to benefit from the settlement procedure. Google also proposed a series of corrective measures to address certain breaches identified by the Autorité de la concurrence.