Journalists in France claimed victory on Tuesday, after they said that they had won the battle with the internet giant. The Silicon Valley giant dropped its attempt to appeal a $500 million fine by the country's competition authority after agreeing to a new slate of licensing deals with publishers. Benot Curé, President of the French Competition Authority, said in a Tuesday press release that the country will finally have a digital media landscape with "guarantee". The fine the company is being forced to pay isn't mentioned in the post. Missoffe notes that the company has agreements with more than 150 publications and that it has worked hard to agree on a negotiation framework with publishers. An "independent Trustee" will be appointed by Google to keep an eye on how the company deals with publishers.
The French press has been winning for a long time. You need to understand the rocky relationship between the news apparatus and the internet.
All news outlets are forced to play ball with the company in order to be featured in either of the two websites. Playing ball with the company means giving up a small amount of ad revenue to the internet search engine.
While newsrooms around the world are fighting to survive, it stands to reason that some of them would attempt to revolt. In the U.S., we are seeing an ongoing suit between 200 news publishers and Google over allegations that the companies unfairly tilted the ad market and gutted their publications in the process.
Things are different in Europe. At the beginning of the year, EU lawmakers agreed to back a new copyright bill that would force news aggregations and search engines to pay publishers for showing snippets from their websites. The company said that the bill would hurt Europe's creative and digital economies. That is what we have seen when other revenue-sharing bills have passed before.
When Spain passed a similar law in 2014), the company abruptly shut down Google News across the country, meaning that Spanish news publishers were blocked off from any traffic the aggregation could give. One study estimated Spanish news outlets lost the equivalent of $11 million in the immediate aftermath of the law going through because profits depend almost entirely on traffic in the digital publishing world. When Spain took a softer stance on copyright law, it allowed publishers to decide how their revenue sharing agreements would shake out.
The EU's new copyright directive was adopted by French authorities in 2019. The company was able to find a loophole that would allow it to not pay local publishers.
Less than a year later, the country's antitrust authority stepped in to let the company know that it couldn't get out things that easy, and ordered it to negotiate with publishers over paying for their content.
The French regulators were quick to point out that the deals were less than ideal for a number of reasons, which led to another investigation. The country's competition authority imposed a fine of half a billion euros against the search giant over allegations that the company was pulling tricks like withholding vital information from publishers during negotiations.
The half-a-billion dollar fine was disproportionate to Google's efforts to reach an agreement and comply with the new law, so the company tried to appeal it. The company pulled in $258 billion in one year. The fine was a small part of the total bottom line. Take the disproportionate claim with a grain of salt.
The search giant decided that the appeals were more of a hassle than it was worth. The French authority stated in the press release that the company will be following through on certain commitments it has made to publishers, including passing relevant intel back to publishers in a timely manner. These commitments are likely to put an end to the competition concerns that led to this mess.
Publishers and press agencies will be remunerate for their neighboring rights as a result of these commitments. We will continue to work on securing more agreements with French publishers and news agencies to support journalism in France.
It's great! Next, do journalism in the United States.
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