France fines Google $270 million
The fine is linked to a copyright dispute in France over online content in a case triggered by complaints from some of the country’s biggest news organisations.
France’s competition regulator fined Google $271 million Wednesday, saying the search giant breached some commitments it made to negotiate fair licence deals with an array of news publishers in the country.
In 2022, Google made binding commitments to negotiate licence deals fairly, including a pledge to give publishers estimates of indirect revenue it generates when including news content in its search results.
On Wednesday, the watchdog said Google’s AI-powered chatbot Bard – since rebranded under the name Gemini – was trained on content from publishers and news agencies, without notifying them.
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Google has pledged not to contest the facts as part of settlement proceedings, according to Reuters, adding the company also proposed a series of remedy measures for certain shortcomings.
The fine is linked to a copyright dispute in France over online content in a case triggered by complaints from some of the country’s biggest news organisations, including Agence France Presse (AFP).
Reuters said initially the dispute appeared to be resolved in 2022 when the US tech giant dropped its appeal against an initial 500 million euro fine issued at the end of a major investigation carried out by the Autorite de la Concurrence.
But in Wednesday’s statement, the France watchdog said Google violated the terms of four out of seven commitments agreed in the settlement, including conducting negotiations with publishers in good faith and providing transparent information.
The watchdog in particular cited Google’s AI chatbot Bard, launched in 2023, which it said was trained on data from unspecified media outlets and news agencies without the company informing them or the regulator.
“Subsequently, Google linked the use of the content concerned by its artificial intelligence service to the display of protected content,” the watchdog said, adding that in doing so Google hindered the ability of publishers and press agencies to negotiate fair prices.
The fine on Google comes as many publishers, writers and newsrooms seek to limit the scraping – or automatic collection of data – by AI services of their online content without their consent or fair compensation.
In 2023, the New York Times sued Microsoft and OpenAI, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper’s articles without permission to help train chatbots.
Writers, computer coders and other groups have also filed copyright suits against companies that build generative AI, technologies that generate text, images and other media.
