Google fined $592 million in dispute with French publishers

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France’s competition regulator announced that it has fined Google 500 million euros ($592 million) over a dispute with French publishers who want the company to pay for the use of their news.

The agency threatened fines of another 900,000 euros (around $1 million) per day if Google doesn’t produce proposals within two months on how it will compensate news producers.

The dispute is part of a larger effort by the European Union to force Google and other tech companies to compensate publishers for content.

source

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I thought Google News just hosted news links. Didn't realize compensation was required for that

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Ok so I was thought I must be reading this wrong since how in the f*ck could you force a search engine to pay for the content it provides considering it is just the link to the actual source of the content. But apparently that is exactly what these countries are doing. Google is being punished for it's convenience and popularity because people would rather "google it" than skim through news outlets websites. 

 

"Google had initially balked at paying for news, saying news companies benefited from the millions of readers it sends to their websites. News companies, meanwhile, have been demanding for years that digital giants pay for news content they siphon from commercial media while taking the lion’s share of ad revenue.

In Australia, Google and Facebook have signed licensing deals with news companies after the government passed a law this year requiring digital giants to help pay for journalism.

Google has been repeatedly targeted by French and European Union antitrust authorities for various business activities seen as abusing its market dominance, including a 220 million euro fine that the French competition watchdog issued the company last month for abusing its ‘dominant position’ in the online advertising business."