Google was slapped a $593 million fine by antitrust regulators in France on Monday. The ruling comes after multinational technology company failed to comply with an April 2020 decision by the French regulators to negotiate a deal “in good faith”. In the past few years, this U.S. tech giant has already copped up with several fines imposed upon it. This is the biggest ever fine imposed by the Competition Authority for a company’s failure to adhere to one of its rulings.
It is reported that the company failed to offer a fair deal to local publishers for hosting their news content on its platform. The U.S. tech giant is directed to come up with proposals on how it would compensate new agencies and publishers within the next two months, sources informed. Failure to do so would make the company face additional fines of up to 900,000 euros per day. Google said in a statement that it is “very disappointed” by the decision. The company insisted that “We have acted in good faith during the entire negotiation period. This fine does not reflect the efforts put in place, nor the reality of the use of news content on our platform”.
French publishers accuse the tech company of having failed to hold talks in good faith with them to find common ground for the remuneration of news content online, under a recent European Union directive that creates so-called “neighboring rights”.