France’s competition authority has levied a hefty fine of €250 million ($271 million) against Google, its parent company Alphabet, and two subsidiaries for violating a previous agreement regarding the use of copyrighted content for training its Bard AI service, now known as Gemini. This fine comes as a result of Google’s failure to adequately inform publishers about remuneration or provide them with an opportunity to opt out of having their content used for AI training purposes.
The Autorité de la concurrence’s ruling on Wednesday highlighted Google’s non-compliance with a settlement reached in June 2022 over the use of news stories in its search results, News, and Discover pages. Google had avoided a fine at that time by committing to engage in good-faith negotiations with news providers regarding compensation for their content, among other measures.
However, the competition authority found that Google did not uphold these commitments. Specifically, Google failed to provide news agencies and publishers with a transparent assessment of their remuneration for usage rights and did not ensure that the negotiations did not impinge on other economic relations between Google and the publishers.
The authority also accused Google of using news content to train its Bard AI service (now called Gemini) without obtaining permission from the publishers and without providing access to an opt-out tool that would have allowed them to contest the AI usage.
In response to the authority’s ruling, Google issued an official blog post expressing its disagreement with the fine, deeming it “disproportionate.” However, the tech giant stated that it would pay the fine rather than contest it, indicating a willingness to move past the issue.
This is not the first time Google has faced penalties in this case. In July 2021, the competition authority fined Google €500 million for practices that were deemed likely to harm the press sector.
