So, what actually happened? How did Google not act in good faith in these talks? The article doesn't present any details whatsoever. Is there a document by the French authorities actually detailing what happened?
From what I understand, there was a previous judgement which forced Google to to certain things to comply with the law. And Google intentionally didn't do those things in the 3 months delay
Funny to see l'autorite de la concurrence completely ignore the french monopolies like La Poste and the SNCF. I guess it pays to focus on foreign companies.
They are state-owned (SNCF is owned at 100% by the state, La Poste ~75% by the state and ~25% by the Caisse des dépots (also the state)). Of course they can have monopolies.
I find stories like the one linked incredibly frustrating. There's no detail whatsoever about what actually happened, so we're basically in a he-said-she-said between google and the regulator. If google's done something wrong I want to hear about what actually happened!
Apparently there was a new law in 2019 imposing Platform owners like Google to "share value created through their platform", which means share ad revenues with news creators (for no good reason whatsoever, we are back in Middle-Ages with this kind of 'droit de passage'). EU regulations are completely crazy at this stage, and applied mostly to force foreign companies to pay up.
From the PDF of the decision (see Pelote's post) I understand that Google was supposed to strike a fair deal with the news publishers to continue to post excerpts and images from articles.
The publishers never really wanted Google to stop using the material but they wanted compensation.
Instead, Google just decided to not publish anything so they didn't have to pay.
They are accused of acting in bad faith and using their dominant position to the detriment of the news publishers: either use their material without paying or not publishing anything. In either case, it's detrimental to the news publishers.
I can see the logic here. Google is the de facto search engine and as such dominates the market. They basically have more bargaining power than the news publishers and did not manage to reach a fair agreement, as mandated by the law that came out in 2019 (the goal was to level the playing field).
So google is trying to side-step the law to the detriment of the news publishers. Basically, Google is not doing what they were required -by law- to do.
Forcing someone to do something for you and them forcing them to pay you for the privilege is extortion. I hope Google simply stops doing business in France and blocks French IPs until France comes to it's senses.
I'm not the biggest Google fan but the precedents being set here are ridiculous.
It's not the newspapers that forced google to publish their content, it's Google that found value in publishing news publisher content for free.
Google made money from this with ads on the pages that showed article excerpts and pictures they had no rights to, not just links.
The decision paper from the Competition Authority has all the details of the claims and it doesn't really look good for Google. It's clear Google tried hard to muddy the waters and evade their duty to negotiation and neutrality in how they present information to force the news publishers into signing unfavourable deals: either give away content for free or nearly free or get deranked.
The purpose of the law is to provide a level playing field so Big tech can't just enforce whatever suit them to the detriment of those they benefit from.
If they take your content to provide service to users and make money from it, I find it fair that there should be some type of compensation in place.
I think we've accepted whatever google does as being holy for too long. It's allowed the corporations to benefit from other people's work to provide value for their own services without really sharing in the profit.
It's a shift in thinking but I think it's not necessarily a bad one.
The high level seems to be "Our newspapers are struggling because of the rise of the internet. Google isn't French, is a big internet player and nobody likes them, so we're holding them responsible".
The detail has been 'found' to match that high level sentiment.
This is an assumption; the article doesn't support this explanation over other potential explanations, and you didn't provide any other source that does.
Going by bloomberg they offered the same amount they pay for weather data[1]. As far as I understand offering to pay the same for something that involves a lot of manual work as you do for what should be a highly automated process kinda undercuts any possibility of this being a sane offer.
