Technology giant Google has been fined 600 Million heavily in the European country France.
The French regulator has decided to fine Google about 600 million.
France’s regulatory body has also said it will impose further penalties if it does not submit a proposal to pay the news agencies within two months.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, the French regulator said Google had ignored several attempts to reach an agreement with French news agencies and publishers.
Google has been fined 500 million euros for non-compliance. Google will be fined 900,000 a day if news agencies do not come up with new compensation proposals within the next two months.
Isabel de Silva, head of France’s antitrust agency, said: “If a regulatory body assigns a legal obligation, it must abide by it, both in letter and spirit. But unfortunately, Google did not fulfill its responsibility in this case.
According to him, Google did not present good intentions in its agreements and negotiations with news agencies and publishers and refused to sit down to discuss the issue of paying for publishing news content online.
Google, meanwhile, has expressed frustration with France’s decision to impose a multimillion-dollar fine on it.
A Google spokesman said in a statement: “We are working with good intentions throughout the process. This fine has undermined our efforts to reach an agreement as well as the reality of how news works on our platform.
According to Google, it has signed agreements with the French news media organization Alliance de la Presse de Information Generale and has separate agreements with some of the leading media outlets, including Le Monde and Le Figaro.
It may be recalled that in 2019, the European Union had decided to pay the relevant news organization for the news content shared on search engines and social media platforms.
Accordingly, Google made a significant decision last year to pay news agencies 1 billion over the next three years for news licensing.
