Recently, the agency examined Google's position in the advertising market and found the company guilty of abusing its dominant position.
Penalty: EUR 220 million in fines.
Now they have examined how the tech giant follows the law on "link tax", which means that news providers who get their material listed in the search results should be paid.
Google has not negotiated in good spirits with the news media about what they were previously required to do by the French Competition Authority, which is therefore imposing its highest fine to date: 500 million euros.
- A search engine works thanks to the content, without content no search engine.
If they do not share the revenue with us, they are like parasites on our content, thunders Pierre Petillault, CEO of the Alliance de la Presse d'Information Générale (APIG), which represents many of the French newspaper publishers.
Google is customizing the offer
Google says it is disappointed with the decision, but will follow suit.
“Our goal remains: turn the tables with a definitive settlement.
We will take the feedback from the French Competition Authority and adapt our offer, ”the company said in a statement.
It has previously been claimed that it is in the nature of the internet that it should be free to link, and that this principle is threatened by demands to pay for it.
In addition, a large part of the news media's advertising revenue online comes from traffic that comes via Google and Facebook.
- There is no one who forbids them to show search results!
The news media need their search results to get traffic, no doubt, but the value created thereby must be shared, Pierre Petillault answers APIG.
Several lawsuits in competition matters
The French decision is based on the national law that France became the first in the EU to introduce after the EU directive on copyright that came in 2019. Sweden has missed the deadline, which was in early June, to make Swedish law of it.
But in the rest of the world, the snare is increasingly tightened around the tech giants in the matter.
In Australia last winter, the government threatened legislation if Google and Facebook did not bid at the negotiating table and began paying to link to news.
Also in the companies' home country, the USA, several lawsuits are pending against them in competition matters.
- Europe has taken the lead in questioning companies such as Google, Amazon, Facebook and Apple from a competition perspective. Now that the American authorities are also reacting, we can cooperate in a way that makes us more efficient in relation to these platforms, states the French Competition Authority's Director General Isabelle de Silva.