"The French Competition Authority held that the deal Google offered to news sites—let us index your site for free or we won't index it at all—was an abuse of that market power and contrary to the spirit of the new French law."
This is why this law is so terrible. If the government wants news media to keep its role in society, it should not force a private entity to pay a "failed to monetize the web"-tax.
News companies cannot demand payment while they demand that Google indexes their pages for them. The lobbying of the news industry it truly terrible and has made me question if I want to pay for any news media when the national news service is perfectly fine and accessible for free. I want to support independent journalism, but I don't want to sponsor the moneymaking schemes they're inserting into the law.