In the ongoing dispute between Google and France’s competition authority over copyright protections for news snippets, the Autorité de la Concurrence has announced a €250 million fine against Google. This is around $270 million at the current exchange rate.
The competition watchdog found that Google violated some of its previous commitments with news publishers, particularly regarding its use of news content to train its generative AI model Bard/Gemini. The authority criticized Google for not notifying news publishers about its use of their copyrighted content for this purpose, despite earlier commitments aimed at ensuring fair payment talks with publishers over the reuse of their content.
Copyright and Competitions
The saga began in 2019 when the EU passed a digital copyright reform extending protections to news headlines and snippets. Google initially tried to evade the law by switching off Google News in France, but the competition authority intervened, finding this action an abuse of Google’s dominant market position. This intervention led Google to negotiate deals with local publishers over content reuse.
However, in 2021, Google was fined $592 million after the competition authority found major breaches in its negotiations with local publishers. Google called the sanction “disproportionate” and appealed but later sought to settle the dispute by offering pledges and withdrawing its appeal, which were accepted by the French Autorité.
Google has now agreed not to contest the Autorité’s latest findings, in exchange for a fast-tracked process and a monetary payment. Despite this, Google’s managing director for news and publishing partnerships, Sulina Connal, expressed displeasure, stating that “the fine is not proportionate to issues raised” by the authority.
Google’s Gemini
Google’s Gemini Model Training
The Autorité’s enforcement focused on Google’s use of content from news publishers for training its AI foundation model Bard and its related AI chatbot service Gemini. Google defended its actions, citing an exemption in the EU Copyright Directive for text and data mining. However, the Autorité argued that Google breached its commitment to inform publishers about the use of their content for training Bard.
The Autorité also criticized Google for failing to provide a technical solution to allow publishers to opt out of their content being used to train Bard without affecting its display on other Google services. It found Google’s information to publishers about its methodology for calculating remuneration was opaque and that Google did not meet non-discrimination criteria, among other issues.
In conclusion, Google has settled with the Autorité but maintains that the fine is disproportionate. The Autorité’s enforcement highlights the challenges tech companies face in balancing the use of copyrighted content for AI training while ensuring fair compensation for content creators.
