The French government wants Google to pay up
Under the ruling, Google must conduct “good faith negotiations” with French news organizations to arrive at a non-zero price for Google to pay to link to their content. Google must begin negotiations with news organizations within three months and send the competition agency monthly reports on its progress.
During negotiations, Google must reinstate snippets in news article search results. Google will be required to retroactively pay news organizations for linking to them, going back to October 2019, at whatever rate is determined in the negotiations. The regulator is also ordering Google not to alter the indexing, classification, or presentation of “protected content"—e.g. French news articles—in its search results.
Thursday’s ruling was a preliminary decision designed to protect French newspapers from Google’s allegedly abusive practices while the competition authority works on its ultimate ruling on the legal merits. Google controls more than 90 percent of the French search market, and the agency says that makes it likely to hold a dominant position. Thursday’s decision held that Google’s recent actions were “difficult to reconcile” with the new French copyright law, which was designed to generate payments from technology platforms to news organizations.
French authorities are trying to avoid the outcome of a similar law passed in Spain back in 2014. That law tried to force Google to pay Spanish news organizations for linking to them, but Google responded by shutting down the Spanish version of Google news. Traffic to Spanish news sites fell as a result, with smaller news publications taking the biggest hit.
The French fight could be a preview of battles in other EU nations, all of which are supposed to pass their own versions of the EU copyright directive, including the controversial provision on linking to news sites.