In this file photo taken on September 2, 2015, the Google logo is
displayed at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. PHOTO
| JUSTIN SULLIVAN | GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA | AFP
Paris,
France’s
competition regulator said Thursday that Google must start paying media
groups for displaying their content, ordering it to begin negotiations
after refusing for months to comply with Europe’s new digital copyright
law.
The agency said it
“requires Google, within three months, to conduct negotiations in good
faith with publishers and news agencies on the remuneration for the
re-use of their protected contents”.
“This
injunction requires that the negotiations effectively result in a
proposal for remuneration from Google” that must be applied
retroactively to October 2019, when France became the first country to
ratify the EU law.
NEIGHBOURING RIGHTS
The
new rule on so-called “neighbouring rights” is designed to ensure news
publishers are compensated when their work is shown on websites, search
engines and social media platforms.
But Google, which effectively
has a lock on internet searches in Europe, refused to comply, saying,
articles, pictures and videos would be shown in search results only if
media groups consent to let the tech giant use them at no cost.
If
they refuse, only a headline and a bare link to the content will
appear, Google said, almost certainly resulting in a loss of visibility
and potential ad revenue for the publisher.
Media groups and news agency Agence France-Presse lodged a complaint with the competition regulator last November.
IMMEDIATE HARM
The
regulator said Thursday that “Google’s practices … were likely to
constitute an abuse of a dominant position, and caused serious and
immediate harm to the press sector”.
Google
said that since the new European copyright law came into force in
France last year, it had been “engaging with publishers to increase our
support and investment in news”.
Google
Vice-President for News Richard Gingras said in a statement seen by
AFP: “We will comply with the (French competition regulator’s) order
while we review it and continue those negotiations.”
Google
had previously said the neighbouring rights law does not impose a fee
for posting links, and that European news publishers already derived
significant value from the eight billion visits they receive each month
from internet users who do searches on Google.
While
the law does include the option of free licences, the competition
regulator questioned Google’s position that generally no remuneration
would be paid for the display of any protected content.
REMUNERATION
It
said: “[This choice seems difficult to reconcile with the purpose and
scope of the law, which aimed to redefine the sharing of value in favour
of press publishers vis-à-vis platforms, by assigning a neighbouring
right which must give rise to remuneration …”
Furthermore,
the regulator said by imposing a principle of zero remuneration on all
publishers without examining their respective situations and the
protected content, Google may have engaged in discriminatory practices
that would likely constitute an abuse of a dominant position.
The
competition regulator said that the interim measures, which will
require Google to publish material via methods chosen by publishers,
will help provide for balanced negotiations and ensure neutrality for
how information is indexed and classified for readers to find.
It
added the interim measures would remain in force until it reaches a
decision on the merits of the case, and that Google is required to
submit monthly reports on procedures for implementing the injunction.
France’s Culture ministry, which subsidises much of the media sector, welcomed the injunction.
“Google
now has to propose news publishers a fair remuneration commensurate
with the value that the search engine derives from the content,” Culture
minister Franck Riester said in a statement.
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