Google appealing French 500 million euro fine
Google is appealing a 500 million euro fine by France’s competition authority in a dispute on how the company is using publishers’ editorial content under the European Union’s updated copyright directive.
“We disagree with some of the legal elements, and consider the amount of the fine to be disproportionate compared to the efforts we have put in place to reach a deal and respect the new law,” Sebastien Missoffe, head of Google France, said in a statement to French media.
The French anti-trust authority in July fined Google for failing to comply fully with temporary orders it had given in a controversy with some the French news publishers. The company was given two months to provide a proposal on how to pay the publishers for using their content online. No such proposal had been made official when the deadline was passed.
News publishers APIG, SEPM and the news agency AFP have said Google never opened talks in good faith with them about paying for using their content online.
When the fine was issued in July, Google said: “Our objective remains the same: we want to turn the page with a definitive agreement. We will take the French Competition Authority’s feedback into consideration and adapt our offers”.
The background is that Google was ordered to negotiate with all publishers based on the EU’s new copyright directive about paying for using publishers’ content online. However, Google only agreed to pay some publishers for contributing to the company’s News Showcase and publishers left out of the agreement complained.
The authority said that Google’s behaviour was the result of a deliberate, elaborate and systematic strategy of non-compliance with injunction and appeared to be the continuation of the opposition strategy of Google, put in place for several years, to oppose the principle of the directive on related rights, then to minimize its concrete scope as much as possible.
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