France fined Google 300 billion won for violating news usage fee contract

The French antitrust authority has imposed a fine of 250 million euros (approximately 360 billion KRW) on Google. This was due to Google's failure to comply with four out of seven commitments made in 2022 to resolve disputes with French media companies.

On the 20th (local time), the French competition authority stated in a press release that "Google violated the contracts made with media companies regarding news content usage fees." The authority judged that Google failed to keep promises such as ▲conducting sincere negotiations within three months based on 'transparent, objective, and non-discriminatory' criteria ▲providing necessary information to media companies for fee setting ▲taking measures to ensure that fee negotiations do not affect other relationships with media companies. It also pointed out that Google used content from French media companies without permission when launching Bard, an AI chatbot equipped with the large language model (LLM) 'Gemini.'

[Image source=Reuters Yonhap News]

Google promised not to dispute these facts and received a series of corrective measures to improve the violations.

Previously, since 2019, Google and French media companies had conflicts over how Google displayed news content on its homepage and the related payment of usage fees. Google earned significant revenue from online search advertising by exposing articles, photos, and videos provided by French media companies in search results but did not provide appropriate compensation.

In response, the European Union (EU) established copyright regulations in 2019 to allow receiving usage fees for news content consumed on search engines and social networking services (SNS), and France requested Google to pay usage fees based on this.

When Google refused, the French Press Association (APIG) and AFP news agency filed a complaint against Google with the competition authority. In April 2020, the authority ordered Google to start negotiations with media companies within three months.

The following July, Google was fined 500 million euros (approximately 685.3 billion KRW at the time) by the authority for not negotiating sincerely with media companies, and in June 2022, a final agreement on the related contract was reached.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.