Fine for Google

France's antitrust regulator has issued a €500m fine against Google, the regulator said in a statement on its website on Tuesday.

It noted that "the regulator fined the company for failing to comply with several court orders issued in April 2020". According to Agence France-Presse, the fine was issued for "the corporation did not properly negotiate with press publishers about the application of related rights, about rewarding editors for the use of their content".

"When the regulator makes injunctions against companies, they should be scrupulously enforced. This did not happen in this case", said the head of France's competition authority.

In April last year, the EU approved a directive strengthening enforcement of copyright law in the posting of works on the internet. Among other things, it extends the rights of media publishers, allowing them to receive remuneration when their content is used by online platforms. At the same time, the document allows websites to freely post targeted links to articles and other media materials.

At the end of July 2019, based on this directive, France adopted a law "creating a neighbouring law for the benefit of news agencies and media editors". According to this document, news aggregators, social networks and other online platforms must pay media outlets for publishing their content under a special agreement. The amount of payment depends not only on the investment of the publication in the creation of the specific material, but also on how much benefit the aggregator receives from the posting of the relevant material.