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| Google makes pledges on news payments in France |
In its latest move to placate European competition authorities, Google France has made a series of commitments to French antitrust authorities in the hope of resolving a costly intervention with legally binding payments to display newsroom clippings.
In July last year, France's competition authority fined the tech giant €5 billion over a series of alleged violations by the tech giant in its negotiations with news publishers to reward them for reusing their content.
This relates to the agreement that the European Union reached in 2019 on reforming digital copyright law. messages) frequent use.
Although there was a lot of criticism of the reform at the time, the directive gave EU news publishers power over Google.
This appears to have contributed to the search giant's decision to drop its previous hard line and instead develop content licensing products for news publishers.
However, the News Showcase product appears to be Google's attempt to circumvent legal requirements at a lower cost.
This is achieved by utilizing global news licensing tools to comply with increasingly national laws regarding rewards for news content and obtaining full rights to content from publishers in the process. France calls this bad behaviour.
France was one of the first EU member states to adopt the EU-wide Copyright Directive into national law. The French competition authority has taken strict action to enforce complaints about Google's compliance with the new rules.
When Google tried to bypass law enforcement in the country, the regulator rejected this approach. It was discovered last year that the company may have abused its dominant position.
He also ordered the company to negotiate in good faith with publishers to pay for viewing proprietary content. This gave him three months to complete the job.
Google is trying to appease European competition authorities
After several complaints from French publishers, the French competition authority stepped in once again to investigate Google's actions.
Based on initial concerns, it continued to implement the interim measures in July. The French competition authority considers that the company has accepted unfair and discriminatory terms of settlement.
The latest development is that the French competition authority has revealed details of a number of commitments from Google to try and close the investigation.
The Committee discussed these recommendations. Third parties, editors and news organizations are invited to submit comments by January 31, 2022.
Then have a hearing with the people close to you. He can close the case - if he determines that the company's obligations are acceptable - and make it binding on the company at this point.
They can also choose to change and reinforce their commitments. Therefore, the company's offer is by no means the last word.