Google was fined €250 million
Google was fined €250 million (US$271 million) by the French competition body Autorité de la Concurrence for not reaching agreements with news outlets for the use of their material in search results.
The fine coincides with continuing disputes over equitable remuneration and transparency between news organizations and large language model (LLM) developers.
In the ongoing dispute over AI content payment, France fines Google
Google asserts that Autorité de la Concurrence employed press content—without disclosing to or requesting permission from publishers—to train its large language model (LLM), Gemini.
With this fine, Google has now been subject to penalties from the Autorité de la Concurrence for comparable issues twice in the last four years. Google was penalized €500 million by the authority in 2020 for alleged anti-competitive behavior.
In response, Google disputed the fine on a blog post, claiming it was excessive and did not adequately represent their attempts to address the issues brought up.
Google’s Issues with News Proceed throughout Europe
The episode demonstrates an increasing pattern of conflict between major media organizations and developers of linguistic models (LLMs). Similar disagreements have surfaced between TIME Magazine and The New York Times, as well as OpenAI.
Additionally, some EU MPs expressed alarm about Microsoft’s cooperation with French AI company Mistral, questioning possible favoritism towards French enterprises. These accusations have been refuted by the French government.
Similar inquiries over Google’s News Showcase service were previously conducted in Germany; nevertheless, the matter was ultimately resolved. Google even pulled its News service from Spain in 2014 in reaction to a regulation that allowed Spanish media to charge for excerpts of their content.
The result of this most recent disagreement is yet to be seen. However, it serves as a clear indication that the conversation surrounding fair compensation and transparency in the LLM industry is only just beginning.