France fines Google €500M over copyright row | Hacker News Reader

France fines Google €500M over copyright row

reuters.com

137 pointsthe-dude196 comments

From a previous article[1] with some more context:

>In 2019, Google announced it was going to stop displaying "snippets" from French news articles in search results. Google believed that showing only news story headlines, not brief excerpts from articles, would bring it into compliance with the new law.

So even just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets was still not in compliance.

We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on referred url links (with no snippets) without monetary payment but now French news organizations want compensation for it. I don't understand that logic. They get extra visibility + traffic clicks from Google -- but also want to be paid for it?!?

If after a Apple WWDC event, the front page of HN is filled with url links to Apple press releases and announcements, it doesn't mean HN should pay money to Apple Inc to send eyeballs to "apple.com". Linking to other urls and showing the text between "<title>...</title>" (for free) is how the web works.

IMO, removing the embedded snippets should have been enough. This feels more like a shakedown from French newspapers with backing from the France government rather than fair business compensation.

Right now, on the HN frontpage is this headline "France fines Google €500M over copyright row (reuters.com)" -- with no snippet -- but according to logic of French newspapers, HN still needs to pay Reuters in Canada a license fee.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/01/google-agrees-to...

If you can't innovate, litigate.

Sadly, it's becoming EU's business model.

Not sadly. Fortunately.

If you hate the EU, sure. But I live here and I would’ve liked it to become more business friendly, competitive and innovative instead.

Google is not known as a friendly, competitive company. Google has a monopoly with Android and privacy laws are completely ignored.

It would have been great to see them tell Google to deindex them and then they create FrenchNewsSearch.fr or whatever to actually compete, but sadly they just get the government to do the dirty work.

Innovate like google: find new ways to avoid the law.

It's important to note that the fine is not for violating copyright, but for defying an order by the antitrust regulator to have talks with newspapers about the issue.

I'm not sure what the intended procedure for "we believe we fixed the issue, we don't have to talk about it anymore" is, but whatever Google did apparently wasn't it.

Google didn't defy the order by not having had talks. They did talk with the French publishers, but the publishers felt Google didn't act in good faith in those talks.

To be a bit more precise, Google didn't provide all the information regarding their earning based on copyrighted content they display on their platform. They also unilaterally decided to exclude part of the press and part of the copyroghted content from negotiations. They also unilaterally made the negotiations specific to Google Showcase. The antitrust regulator is fining Google because they consider that all this is a systematic strategy to cause negotiations to fail rather than comply to the EU directive of 2019.

It's the question of scale. For example, it's one thing to take a photo of a street, and another one to photograph all streets and buildings creating a visual representation of the whole country. Sovereign countries have the right to decide certain things are not in the best interests of their citizens and ban such activities, regardless of what is our opinion of it.

> They get extra visibility + traffic clicks from Google -- but also want to be paid for it?!?

Visibility is not a meaningful "reward" for established European newspapers (they are not unknown hobby bloggers.) The issue is who is capturing revenue from the work. The newspapers make money from people browsing their site (long ad exposure) or paying for subscriptions.

The news model: journalists discover "news facts" which they make into "news stories" that can hold reader attention.

If Google collects all "news facts" in one place with their own ads, they are benefiting from journalists while undercutting the newspapers.

If the headline being the valuable content is true, it suggests there could be a business that's like a newspaper that only publishes headlines without articles.

I'm not saying this to refute your comment! This might actually be a valid idea.

I believe that would be Fark, or maybe Twitter.

Yes, also like Twitter in that the headline/tweet without substance is adequate for most people these days.

This is one reason why social media has been such a successful part of political disinformation campaigns.

>The news model: journalists discover "news facts" which they make into "news stories" that can hold reader attention.

>If Google collects all "news facts" in one place with their own ads, they are benefiting from journalists while undercutting the newspapers.

If "news facts" is the framework for the proposed logic of compensation, it is being applied inconsistently.

Consider the final result of 2 professional soccer teams playing a game: FC Barcelona beats Real Madrid 2-1. The "facts" were generated by the players + the referee + the official scorekeeper, etc. A French newspaper reports on it: https://www.leparisien.fr/sports/football/direct-suivez-le-c...

Using first principles of "facts generation", should the French newspaper be required by Spain to share a portion of the ad revenue to each soccer team and La Liga league? If no, why is that not hypocritical?

Same as Ryanair announces a new airline route and French newspapers report it. It doesn't mean French publishers should pay some of their ad money to Ryanair.

Likewise, if Google issues a press release saying the next "Pixel 7 phone will be available October 2021" and French newspapers report that fact, it doesn't mean they should owe Google money just because Google produced that headline.

Newspapers have traditionally benefited from headlines being generated by the entire world and they get ad money for it without paying the sources of those headlines.

If Google did include article snippets beyond the headlines, that seemed like a reasonable threshold to pay license fees to French newspapers. Otherwise, a pure headline display is a symbiotic relationship similar to the symbioses newspapers enjoyed with sports reporting, Hollywood celebrities, corporate press release announcements, etc. The newspapers want Google to pay for something the newspapers themselves don't want to pay for.

Perhaps under this logic Google should start their own newspaper, which reports the publication of every news story on every French news website. That way they are simply reporting the facts, and are no longer liable for copyright infringement!

If visibility is not a meaningful reward, then I guess Google should just blacklist these news sites from the search engine.

Somehow I have the feeling that news sites wouldn't be happy with that, I wonder why...

> Visibility is not a meaningful "reward" for established European newspapers

Why? There are two ways how I would land on a newspaper's page. One is if I read them regularly, then I just go to their website directly to check what's new. That's what their loyal audience does, and Google doesn't affect that.

Another one is that I'm googling for news about a specific event or specific person - then I go to whatever pages Google shows me. That's how newspaper expand their loyal audience.

It appears that they don't want it and prefer other terms - pay me and you can use my headlines. We cannot force newspapers to accept Google's headlines-for-clicks system against their will.

No, they want the audience google brings. They just want a share of googles profits, riding the anti google sentiment, google got for other things. Classic politics.

Yes, we can, that's what fair use is all about.

Can we force them to accept the reality of how the internet has operated for the last 4+ decades, or are they exempt from that as well?

I could be convinced that demanding to be removed from Google index is legitimate. But it's also not what newspaper want: they want to be indexed and be paid for it, no way for Google not to take the deal. That's state-supported extortion to me.

French newspapers clearly do want it as Google is being forced to display links to French newspapers by the French government.

And yet the same newspapers will protest vigorously is Google removes news completely. Google can opt out of this so called benefit without losing much. But newspapers desperately need this traffic.

Your theory that Google is benefiting more from this arrangement than the newspapers themselves isn’t true.

> And yet the same newspapers will protest vigorously is Google removes news completely. Google can opt out of this so called benefit without losing much. But newspapers desperately need this traffic.

Google can't actually. Google has been ordered to display links and snippets from French newspapers and is explicitly not allowed to remove French newspapers from their results.

That’s my point. The French newspapers need Google for traffic. And so they (unofficially) partnered with the French government and courts to complete the shakedown. The courts force the use of snippets, then the government says “well you’re using these snippets so you must pay for them”.

So, in practice, Google has been ordered to pay. As a European, I can't sympathize with the French newspapers.

Perhaps they can disable the news part completely when viewed from France or does this also include search results?

But only using links seems OK - people will go to the websites and see their ads...

When NYT references the work of The Intercept, as they have done recently, ought the NYT pay The Intercept? [1] And if I summarize the facts of a French news article, ought Google be disallowed from collecting my facts?

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/climate/epa-pfas-fracking...

> Visibility is not a meaningful "reward" for established European newspapers

This is prima facie false. Google is not permitted to simply deindex these papers. The newspapers are demanding to be indexed and referenced, and be paid for it. It's pretty clear here that Google is providing a service to the papers, not the other way around.

"...demanding... and be paid for it"

I'm suspecting it's more important that newspapers are to receive money (for services) than that they demanding to be indexed (requesting service). It's newspapers providing service to Google here, in the form of interesting data which attracts viewers.

Google was happy to refuse the "services" these newspapers were offering, by removing them from their index. The newspapers balked at that—because they get more value from being included in Google's index than they stand to "lose" from having Google show visitors just the headlines with links to the original sites. So they brought the government in to force Google to purchase the newspapers' services whether they wanted them or not.

I suppose this sort of thing isn't common in France? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-papers-57814894

>This feels more like a shakedown from French newspapers with backing from the France government rather than fair business compensation.

Not saying Google is right or wrong in this case but;

EU have had problems with US tech giant for years with their aggressive business practice and Tax avoidance. Aggressive or ruthless from European perspective but the norm from American's POV. Now that even US government are on their side, EU or France in this case are taking every single opportunity to squeeze them.

I see it as political power play more than anything else. Google and Apple have been showing middle fingers to government and regulators around the world for years. They have been waiting for the political climate to act on it.

> Aggressive or ruthless from European perspective but the norm from American's POV.

European international companies avoid taxes via tax havens like Ireland, the Netherlands and Malta just the same as US international companies.

Funnily enough, I stumbled on this data[0] for Ireland, 2016, total revenues booked by nationality of parent company:

China: $2.44bn

Luxembourg: $2.74bn

Italy: $5.86bn

Japan: $8.38bn

France: $18.67bn

Ireland: $77.95bn

US: $364.77bn

I know there other European states and microstates with interesting corporate tax rates. Would be interested to seem a similar comparison.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/07/13/bidens-tax-p...

Most news is nothing more than the headline and even if there's more to it, it's a known problem that people are not reading the article.

Just the headlines create a business for many, like the forums or search engines. You need only the headline to stimulate engagement and show ads but that headline often is generated through the work of many people that are not the beneficiary of that engagement and ad business.

If the headline had no IP value, Google and others would have been generating them without actual connection to reality instead of fetching them from those who send paid employees for on site observations to gather information that would be evaluated and the converted into a headline/title .

I don't say that the French approach is the correct one but obviously the alternative is also not problem free.

HN is not making money by displaying those links

Why do you say that? HN has ads (job ads for YC startups) and also is effectively advertising for YC itself. Without links, no one would come here.

Indirectly. Google places advertisments next to those links (that nowadays look exactly like those links) so we know there is a certain monetary value to every click. If HN sold ad links, and had a scale near google's, i'm sure it would be a candidate to be sued under the same laws too.

These laws are bandaids of course, but the argument that these newspapers "They get extra visibility + traffic clicks" is moot these days - what will they do with that visibility? Would be cool if visibility amounted to advertising money, but google also controls the ad market and the ad money that they make is not sustainable.

US publications have (by now) solved this by shutting down or installing paywalls. But that doesnt work in EU where GDP is at least 30% lower and the local language audience is a fraction of the english audience. It is an untenable situation, and the fact that google can keep paying fine after fine but keep working in the continent is proof that the market is captured in an unsustainable vortex.

So there are going to be a few ways out of this:

- Countries/EU keep fining google for a few years , a solution that is going nowhere

- Google will have to introduce news payments programs in EU / australia etc that pay well

- Google is forced out of the market via protectionism in order to foster local solutions like China and Russia do

- Or publishers themselves will collectively create a rival service for news that pays per click a-la spotify, and remove themselves from google

So even just linking the headlines _without_ the snippets was still not in compliance.

Next they'll discover that it's the URIs themselves which can reveal the headline very well such as in:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/france-fines-google-500-m...

> We have 30+ years of the world wide web being built on referred url links (with no snippets) without monetary payment but now French news organizations want compensation for it.

An injustice existing for a long time does not mean it should continue unabated. Google and Facebook have profited from the work of news organizations and contributed little back. And the way they display snippets, unfortunately, often prevents news orgs from capturing that revenue.

Imagine if academics had to pay publishers a fee for each citation they make. It's beyond me why anyone thinks requiring payment for linking (or citing) is a good idea.

Academics don't make money from publishing

Maybe not academics but publishers absolutely do in many academic fields. It's the reason Sci-Hub exists at all.

Besides, whether you make a profit is hardly relevant to this topic. You could make no profit at all and still be accused of copyright infringement.

I don't see how this is related. Academics get enough tanglible benefit from being cited so they are more than ok with being cited and quoted. News publishers don't make enough and are not happy about it. Copyright infringment is usually not litigated unless someone loses money.

> I don't see how this is related.

Well, I said what if "academics had to pay publishers a fee for each citation they make." In this situation, publishers like Elsevier would be able to extort even more money from academics, and ultimately from taxpayers. I'm sure publishers would be very happy about that while making everyone else miserable.

> Copyright infringment is usually not litigated unless someone loses money.

Partly true. Copyright infringement is litigated when the one suing believes there is money to be made. It doesn't matter where "the money lost" actually belongs to, as evident by court cases ruling in copyright troll's favor. It also doesn't matter whether the one being sued made any money too.

But the most absurd assumption here is that linking has to benefit the creator of the content. If that is the case, no one would have the freedom to criticize the works of others online, or risk being sued of copyright violation. That's not even remotely close to what copyright was supposed to be all about.

Academics make their whole careers from being cited.

I don’t think this is specific to France or the EU. Reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associated_Press_v._Meltwater_.... this kind of thing can happen in the USA, too.

Also, events as I understand them (but I may be mistaken) were:

- google shows headlines, excerpts, sometimes photos and videos in search results

- newspapers want compensation (IMO rightfully. Even if Google brings them more/better visitors than they had before Google did that, there’s no law that forbids companies from making stupid decisions, and it’s their content)

- court orders Google to negotiate about the price for showing content.

- Google removes some French papers completely from search results, stating that would change if they let them show results without payments.

- newspapers see that as misuse of market power (IMO it’s up for debate whether that’s fully true. I don’t know, for example, whether google also said “but we want to show more than headlines, and pay for it” and acted like it)

- court, taking what happened into account fines google, claiming it didn’t try to negotiate in good faith. I don’t know the details, but can think of scenarios where that makes sense.

It has to be noted that most media in France are belonging to a very reduced number of Persons, that are, for most of them billionaires.

(They also avoid paying some wealth taxes by owning shares of media companies...)

And, surprisedly, most of them have personal relationship with the president or top officials of the government...

All true. However 2 wrongs don't make a right. Just because the mass media in France is basically an oligopoly, it changes nothing to Google doing something illegal.

If you look at the whole thing, it does not make any sense at all. Except the media seeing google generating a shit load of money and wanting to take a part of it.

If you think about it, if the article might be interesting, you will go to the website of the media anyway.

But now, most media here are really crappy and are just formatting news from AFP (french Reuter equivalent) or from gov or corp press releases without doing real journalism. And so, logically from their point of view, just showing the title steal the only worthing thing from them. And that does not entitle them to get traffic from Google, but just to receive whatever biggest amount possible from Google without doing anything.

Usually, I'm complaining more about Google bad actions and its monopoly abuses. But in this specific case, I would more likely be on their side, with the impression that they are bullied by the media that are really politically powerful in France.

Imagine, if all the websites referenced in hacker news were starting to ask HN to pay them for the right to list their articles...

And the bad thing is that, once they will win with Google, it will create a precedent and they can legitimately start pursuing the little fishes.

Think about all the corporate assholes around the world that really would like to have the right to decide who link to their website and impose some fees for that!

This just reads like a shakedown to me.

This type of thing makes France seems like a terrible place to do business. Obviously a big market for tech giants, but they are so anti-business and beuracratic. I wouldn’t consider doing anything there.

It is. Not that much innovative businesses start or stay there.

> This type of thing makes France seems like a terrible place to do business.

The forced unionization when you reach 50 employees is one of the main reason no new big company grows locally. Not worth the trouble.

There are plenty of big French companies. The issue is with medium and small companies more than anything. Also the law you're talking about is far from unique to France.

notice I said NEW big companies. good luck finding ones that grew in recent years.

The hate of Google blinds some to the point that we have to see people happy that Google is getting fined for showing news excerpts.

So why the f** Google can screw youtubers with the Disney laws but it should not also apply to Google Search. On Youtube if Google thinks you have a snippet that is similar to something claimed they will punish you , so they decided that using snippets from others and making money is BAD , then the other arm of Google is extracting snippets from others and they make money and this is good now?

That’s Disney’s doing, not Google’s. Sonny Bono used to be known as “the Congressman from Disney”.

So is it fair that Google only respects Dsney(american) laws ? From what I understand if your video has some claimed stuffgoogle can take your money and give it to the big companies, would be fair that also Google search money to go to newspapers too.

Or Google can defend Youtubers rights for fair use too, but we all know they will do whatever makes more money so the a few billionaires will buy a new jet or yacht

You can use parts of copyrighted content for certain kinds of videos including commentary.

Google previously brought up that the newspapers can use robots.txt to prevent the scraping of there site. If you check the robots.txt of the major French newspapers, both allow Googlebot on the main content areas.

The French news paper's both want to be listed on Google yet don't want Google to show previews/snippets. It looks like beggars can be choosers if they cry to the French government.

In this case, as mentioned in the article, Google is fined for not complying with a formal order by France's Competition Authority.

This is how it works in all countries. In the US, try not to take an order by the SEC seriously, for instance...

It used to be that your customers were supposed to like or respect you. Now we have a growing number of companies with customers that actively dislike them, just waiting for a better alternative so they can jump ship. It is a problem with monopolies.

This is on top of the 220 mln euros fine for antitrust abuse in advertising:

https://www.ft.com/content/41266f56-01af-432f-b13f-d03216f82...

Still, it's not quite at the same level as the UBS fine:

https://m.dw.com/en/french-court-hands-swiss-bank-ubs-multi-...

This is just increasing competition in the search space. Any new search engine who is growing big will also have to pay to just "link" another website. And in most cases not be able to afford it.

This is not how I imagine the internet to work :(

This was just lobbying done by newspapers who are dying to social media and better news channels.

> This was just lobbying done by newspapers who are dying to social media and better news channels.

Said newspapers are already heavily subsidized by the French government anyway.., They should just nationalize them and make France an official Soviet State instead of pretending to be a Democracy.

It’s not a fine, it’s a tax disguised as a fine. A protectionist tax France selectively imposes on a successful company from a successful industry based in a foreign country to prop up a dying industry from their own country.

Makes me wish companies had some balls and actually quit markets that treat them like this. But companies are business organizations, not political ones. The actual solution here is in politics: USA should respond symmetrically, by fining/taxing some large French conglomerate doing business in US.

If Google wanted to quit that market, then Godspeed. It would be a tremendous opportunity for someone new to step in (no, I'm, not looking at you Bing).

But alas, I'll bet good money that recalcitrant France is still a market too juicy for Google to abandon.

Wouldn't they have to quit the entire EU? How does that work?

So, what actually happened? How did Google not act in good faith in these talks? The article doesn't present any details whatsoever. Is there a document by the French authorities actually detailing what happened?

There are more details in the link below. It seems to be related to the "neighboring rights" EU directive, whatever that is.

https://m.dw.com/en/france-fines-google-500-million-in-news-...

The high level seems to be "Our newspapers are struggling because of the rise of the internet. Google isn't French, is a big internet player and nobody likes them, so we're holding them responsible".

The detail has been 'found' to match that high level sentiment.

And with this the government makes sure those media conglomerates have a positive opinion of the ruling party.

It's basically corruption no matter how you see it.

>And with this the government makes sure those media conglomerates have a positive opinion of the ruling party.

That probably got a hearty laugh, or at the very least a chuckle, from anybody familiar with French media.

They do adulate the ruling party/President.

This is an assumption; the article doesn't support this explanation over other potential explanations, and you didn't provide any other source that does.

I find stories like the one linked incredibly frustrating. There's no detail whatsoever about what actually happened, so we're basically in a he-said-she-said between google and the regulator. If google's done something wrong I want to hear about what actually happened!

Apparently there was a new law in 2019 imposing Platform owners like Google to "share value created through their platform", which means share ad revenues with news creators (for no good reason whatsoever, we are back in Middle-Ages with this kind of 'droit de passage'). EU regulations are completely crazy at this stage, and applied mostly to force foreign companies to pay up.

Which the general opinion loves since these very same foreign companies "heavily optimise" their local tax bills.

Going by bloomberg they offered the same amount they pay for weather data[1]. As far as I understand offering to pay the same for something that involves a lot of manual work as you do for what should be a highly automated process kinda undercuts any possibility of this being a sane offer.

[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-13/google-sa...

Here https://www.autoritedelaconcurrence.fr/sites/default/files/i... (in french)

From what I understand, there was a previous judgement which forced Google to to certain things to comply with the law. And Google intentionally didn't do those things in the 3 months delay

Funny to see l'autorite de la concurrence completely ignore the french monopolies like La Poste and the SNCF. I guess it pays to focus on foreign companies.

They are state-owned (SNCF is owned at 100% by the state, La Poste ~75% by the state and ~25% by the Caisse des dépots (also the state)). Of course they can have monopolies.

how is that normal for the state to have monopolies exactly?

From the PDF of the decision (see Pelote's post) I understand that Google was supposed to strike a fair deal with the news publishers to continue to post excerpts and images from articles.

The publishers never really wanted Google to stop using the material but they wanted compensation.

Instead, Google just decided to not publish anything so they didn't have to pay.

They are accused of acting in bad faith and using their dominant position to the detriment of the news publishers: either use their material without paying or not publishing anything. In either case, it's detrimental to the news publishers.

I can see the logic here. Google is the de facto search engine and as such dominates the market. They basically have more bargaining power than the news publishers and did not manage to reach a fair agreement, as mandated by the law that came out in 2019 (the goal was to level the playing field).

So google is trying to side-step the law to the detriment of the news publishers. Basically, Google is not doing what they were required -by law- to do.

Forcing someone to do something for you and them forcing them to pay you for the privilege is extortion. I hope Google simply stops doing business in France and blocks French IPs until France comes to it's senses.

I'm not the biggest Google fan but the precedents being set here are ridiculous.

Hmm, that's not what happened.

It's not the newspapers that forced google to publish their content, it's Google that found value in publishing news publisher content for free.

Google made money from this with ads on the pages that showed article excerpts and pictures they had no rights to, not just links.

The decision paper from the Competition Authority has all the details of the claims and it doesn't really look good for Google. It's clear Google tried hard to muddy the waters and evade their duty to negotiation and neutrality in how they present information to force the news publishers into signing unfavourable deals: either give away content for free or nearly free or get deranked.

The purpose of the law is to provide a level playing field so Big tech can't just enforce whatever suit them to the detriment of those they benefit from.

If they take your content to provide service to users and make money from it, I find it fair that there should be some type of compensation in place.

I think we've accepted whatever google does as being holy for too long. It's allowed the corporations to benefit from other people's work to provide value for their own services without really sharing in the profit.

It's a shift in thinking but I think it's not necessarily a bad one.

Let Google drop completely the Google news service in France and let them all suffer by the lack of visibility. When you can't get to a Win-Win proposition, aim for the nuclear Lose-Lose.

Agreed.

This link tax crap sets a disturbing precedent. It would be to the benefit of the web in general, Google in particular, and most specifically to the thinking skills of the EU if Google pulled news, as I think they did in Spain under similar circs.

> It would be to the benefit of the web in general

how come?

it forces the birth of BUZZFEED type "news agency" who make money only by providing fake news with clickbait titles

the content makes the article and the actual news solid and trustable

thinking "titles" is everything is the reason why the western civilization is dead

lack of visibility? lol

that's not knowing how local news outlets gain their audience

how long until people stop defending X big company like google only because they own some of their shares?

it's no wonder China already outpaced NASA in their space missions

people in the west are defending the companies who hold them back only just to seek more profits

google has everything to loose here, they are not a news agency, they want to profit from other people's work

USA is a terrible place to grow a civilization, everything went downhill over there, China is a much better place

> it's no wonder China already outpaced NASA in their space missions

So with this legislation France is going to outpace NASA too? So far European space projects were not doing nearly as well as American ones.

you'll see what's about to happen very soon ;)

Anyone running a business knows that fines at ~day's revenue of the business are at best nuisance (this fine represents ~1.2 days of Google revenue). Google should be able to afford order of magnitude large fines if it helps them buy time and find a "way" to relieve the pressure from news orgs of one country and come up with a more comprehensive answer to this 'threat' in general. Giving the French what they want would add to the streak of precedents that are much more dangerous for Google's bottom line.

Imagine if Google needed to have a revenue share agreement with every website it uses snippets from, anywhere in the world, proportional to appearances/clicks in results? This could be possible because there is nothing special in the laws about news sites as such, they are just more organized in their demands. This would be search 2.0, sustainable for the web, but would 'bad' for the search giant as we know it today.

Sure, but fines stops Google from ignoring the court ruling forever because if they do France will keep finding them umäntil they comply which will cost more than it is worth. Yes, it is often a good deal to intentionally risk fines to delay but not even Google can afford doing it forever.

$500M fine every few months? Google can definitely afford doing it forever. It probably won't and my argument is they were just buying time to come up a with a strong answer to this, which is IMO a serious threat to their business.

Revenue is not profit...

For high margin tech businesses it almost is. Google does not need 150,000 people to operate search&ads. There is a lever it can pull, but doing so would turn it into a different kind of business. Thiel has a great line for this phenomena:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q26XIKtwXQ

Google does far more than search and ads.

But search and ads are 80%+ of its revenue.

> this fine represents ~1.2 days of Google revenue

Of their _global_ revenue. France is not a particularly large country. I could definitely see it being economical for Google to stop operating in France, or to blacklist all these french publishers.

Not operating in France is a threat to global operations because it allows serious runway to competitors.

> France is not a particularly large country.

I get where you're coming from, but by that metric, there are only two large countries. (USA and China) After the top two, France is effectively tied for the third-largest economy in the world (with the UK and India) and is >50% of the size of the top non-USA/China economy (Japan).

This is a truly massive fine by any measure.

First of all you’re looking at global revenue and not just France, which can’t be more than 10%. Second you’re looking at revenue from all sources, and here we’re taking about links just to news sites, which again can’t be more than 10%. So two orders of magnitude at least is $181 billion -> $1.81 billion.

A $500 million fine is likely on the order of 1/3rd of the total annual revenue generated in that market.

It is massive compared to Google's revenue in France, but Google can pay for the fine using its global revenue. Imagine if you ran 100 lemonode stands and one of them gets fined 1/3rd of its revenue. So you basically got fined 1/300th of your total revenue. It is a blip.

>Second you’re looking at revenue from all sources, and here we’re taking about links just to news sites

Although I do not think it is relevant for my point, it is worth saying that Google was not fined for "links to news sites", it was fined for failing to comply with a regulatory order to enter negotiations withs news orgs and come to an agreement within three months (paraphrasing). Basically it is being schooled by French authorities in a display of power (curiously, France as a country is 'only' 10x more powerful than Google, economically speaking).

What IMO is massive about this though, are the potential future implications for Google at its scale, if this becomes a trend and other types of websites 'unionize' around the 'snippet attribution' or a similar idea.

> this fine represents ~1.2 days of Google revenue

Why do people keep mentioning revenue as if it was some sort of useful measurement? When paying fines net profit is what matters.

Hi Googlers! I loudly criticize you all the time but this time I think you are on the right side.

Just leave the French alone until their citizens hound their politicians into learning internet history ;-)

Were I Google, I’d just stop giving French news sources in any search results at all, and make them pay to even appear in the index. Let them whine a bit about Google “having” to do anything for, you know, public good or something. Because I think that internet news portals need Google more than Google needs them, in the current state of the world.

Don’t get me wrong. Google is an atrocious corporation, so are greedy media conglomerates, but watching them fight is mildly entertaining.

I believe the French government forbid Google from removing newspapers from the platform.[0]

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/french-regulator...

Then it looks like France is pure liability at this point.

Does anyone know why the anti-trust authority is involved in what appears to be some form of copyright dispute over the performance of news headlines?

Because the talks about copyright involve Google saying: either share your content for free or we will black list you from our global search monopoly, good luck getting any customers that way.

> either share your content for free or we will black list you from our global search monopoly

How can Google stop showing news headlines without blacklisting news websites from the search engine? Show a stub like "This website has something relevant to your search, but we can't show you what exactly"?

As far as I can tell the switch to headlines only was an attempt by Google to skirt a court order after they had already violated copyright for years.

Imagine you are a notorious drunk, end up in curt and the judge collects your drivers license and tells you exactly how to get it back, do you a) catch the next bus home or b) step into your over priced luxury car like a Google exec and drive away because you are above the law? Google did b).

They didn't violate copyright for years, news were never copyrightable in the first place. They violated a recently introduced EU directive which they agreed to stop violating by not showing snippets from French news websites anymore, but French court had explicitly forbidden them that and said they have no other choice than to buy their services. That doesn't sound like anything compatible with the rule of law to me.

That still leaves them in violation of anti trust law, which apparently was what they were fined for.

Of course the popular opinion seems to be that laws that are meant to restrict abuse by monopolistic companies are not actually laws.

> A Google spokesperson added: "We have acted in good faith throughout the entire process. The fine ignores our efforts to reach an agreement, and the reality of how news works on our platforms."

If only everyone would just accept our reality!

(Honestly I don't really believe in copyrighting news facts, but at this point it's just nice to see Google get fined.)

Astonishing that a mere corporation thinks they have the right to negotiate with a nation-state and "come to an agreement."

Would that I could negotiate having to comply with laws that affect me.

Plea bargains are pretty much negotiation with the state for individuals...

Plea bargains are in fact not a universal thing and illegal in quite a few countries.

People and companies have a right to make representations when they’re subject to things like fines yes. So would you if you were fined.

Have you heard of the legal system?

They were talking about negotiations with news publishers for revenue-sharing (i.e. legalized racketeering).

I hope they don’t cave disgracefully like in Australia and just shut down Google News and remove news sites from the search index in France as they did in Belgium a few years back IIRC. I am a Frenchman and very skeptical of Google, for the record, but rent-seeking by failed businesses should not be condoned, like the copyright levy charged on data storage devices here.

> [...] just shut down Google News and remove news sites from the search index in France [...]

AFAIU the French regulators decreed that Google can't not link, either [0]. It's quite a paradox: Google needs to pay to show snippets or even just linking to French (EU) news sites, but can't not show snippets/link either.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/french-regulator...

They were ordered by the government to come to an agreement with the publishers.

>(Honestly I don't really believe in copyrighting news facts, but at this point it's just nice to see Google get fined.)

It's disturbing to see how people support bad practices just because they are used against Google. Do you hate Google THAT much that nothing matters if they are hurt?

> Do you hate Google THAT much that nothing matters if they are hurt?

Pretty much as long as it's not completely unreasonable.

Bad practices are used by american mega corporations all the time, it is nice to see them get a dose of their own medicine.

Google does not get to decide the judicial reality in France. Or anywhere. Maybe in the US?

I don't hate Google at all. I don't think it would be controversial to say that they seem to have a lot of power relative to the legislatures of the countries they operate in, and it seems like they are able to skirt laws regarding e.g. anti-competitive behaviour, data protection, consumer rights. I don't like the law that they are alleged to have violated here, but I am glad to see proof that it is possible that action is taken against them if they do violate whatever laws they should operate under.

> [...] but I am glad to see proof that it is possible that action is taken against them if they do violate whatever laws they should operate under.

I don't think that was ever in question?

Copyright applies to all equally, maybe we will finally get some lobbying to change it if it hurts billion dollar companies enough. Until then they can suffer under it the same way everyone else does.

Do you hate Google THAT much that nothing matters if they are hurt?

Google has seriously damaged its brand in the past decade. People feel very strongly that Google's invasions of everyone's privacy, their erosion of internet freedom, and their blatant tax avoidance warrants significant punishment. It's not surprising that governments around the world are starting to see Google (and other SV companies) as a form of piggy bank that they can tap for funds occasionally. It's both lucrative and a vote winner.

Besides HN and similar small tech-conscious circles, I've never heard anybody complain about Google's privacy practices or Apple's walled garden.

You should try to get out more then.

Or maybe you should? Going by comments on hn or reddit, you'd think that everybody thinks that amazon was a horrible company (eg. poor treatment of workers, fakes/counterfeits problem, fake reviews, monopolization), yet the surveys show that most people have favorable views of the company[1].

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/sociology/2021-harrispoll-juneusa...

What I love about surveys like that one is that 2% of the 2006 people asked said they've never heard of the U.S Military.

explained by this: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...

> (Honestly I don't really believe in copyrighting news facts, but at this point it's just nice to see Google get fined.)

Insane attitude IMHO opinion. This isn't supporting a football team this is about fairness and reasonable laws.

> (Honestly I don't really believe in copyrighting news facts, but at this point it's just nice to see Google get fined.)

So because you don't like Google, it's OK to see them fined for just any bullshit reason?

Facts cannot be copyrighted, but the content describing the facts is. I have no issue with that but, what if Google deployed some Copilot-like technology to generate its own news feed content?

print some spoof news articles periodically and sue them when they duplicate your "parody content" like the yellow books used to do to prevent duplication of phone numbers.

> what if Google deployed some Copilot-like technology to generate its own news feed content?

Would depend on its feed, surely. Taking the fast-but-insane firehose of Twitter and turning it into an accurate and sensible report is value-adding and fair use, prepending a copied article with "<X> reports..." isn't.

Same as creative work really, so I suppose we'll see the same shenanigans.

I don't know how copyright in France works, but in Germany there is no such thing as Fair Use.

Germany doesn't have a 'Fair Use' doctrine, but its Copyright law has analogous restrictions.

copilot has already ended up reproducing longer snippets of its input perfectly, at least for code that appeared multiple times in its training set. Given that a lot of news papers and sites source some of their articles from the same agencies they would probably end up repeating quite a bit of their input word for word.

If have nothing to comment on this specific case, but the amount is substantial for a single country. This is about as much as the EU has fined Google and Microsoft before.

Now imagine 20 other countries had the balls to do the same, then we might get somewhere. 500 mil stings a little, but not enough.

Not enough? Why do you think showing news excerpts is so bad that they need to be fined 10B for it?

It's not about "how bad it is", it's about how much money Google makes from it. The fine needs to be in the same order of magnitude in order to discourage Google from doing this.

> it's about how much money Google makes from it

How much money does Google make from showing French news headlines?

And why should Google be discouraged from showing those headlines?

This is unhinged zero-sum thinking that would have kept us living in grass huts or driven us to extinction.

If the purpose of a fine is to disincentivise certain behaviour then the degree to which it does so should be of the same magnitude for everyone it applies to. If the magnitude is not equal then all you're doing is discriminating against everyone else.

A $50 parking/speeding fine means something very different to the people working in the cafeteria at Google and the SWEs at Google.

why do we want to stop Google being a news aggregator?

Why not stop showing news snippets?

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/04/french-regulator...

Is it just me or do others also believe that news snippets which lead to a paywalled article must be marked as an ad?

That article is a product which I need to pay for to get access to it, isn't it?

I use a Swedish news aggregator, Omni, which marks all their paywalled articles as paywalled. I love it

Can fines given in a country be deducted from profit in an other country?

Can countries like France just fine Google for something they come up with whenever they want some more money? Seems like they’re being taxed.

That might be the only way to extract money from Google and others short of leaving the EU, yes, considering they don't pay any taxes while extracting massive amounts of value from the country.

> [...] considering they don't pay any taxes while extracting massive amounts of value from the country.

The EU should talk to Ireland then. EU countries are the anti-social tax havens here that encourage international companies to not pay taxes.

You know the world would be a weird place if three people robbed a bank and you only prosecute one while the other two loudly argue over finding a new fall guy for the next robbery.

That analogy obviously doesn't work at all.

Here's the thing: On one hand you have companies trying to minimize taxes any (legal) way they can, and on the other you have countries saying "Here you can (legally) minimize your taxes!".

Any rational thought process is going to conclude that curbing #2 is the only realistic option to tackle that problem; see the global 15% minimum corp tax.

That's why your analogy doesn't work: Here 'prosecuting one the 3 bank robbers' actually prevents further robberies, and is also the only practical way to prevent any further robberies.

> Here's the thing: On one hand you have companies trying to minimize taxes any (legal) way they can, and on the other you have countries saying "Here you can (legally) minimize your taxes!".

Problem is at least with the Ireland case was that there were backroom deals that no one else could be aware of when taxes should be applied equally to everyone. In fact that last part is kinda required by various trade agreements which is the reason most European countries could get so pissed of at Ireland, not the low taxes, but the secrecy in how it applied tax laws to specific heavyweights.

Ireland: Nothing wrong here, the plans where publicly available in a disused lavatory labeled beware of the leopard. Everyone with a direct line to our finance minister could have asked and we would have told them how to apply. Totally nothing illegal going on here.

>The EU should talk to Ireland then.

The problem with the way the EU is structured, is that it's very easy for one or two countries to put their foot down and keep the status quo. See what's happened with Poland and Hungary. But you can also see things like Germany quietly sabotaging any defense program and anything happening outside of NATO or turning energy transition programs into a joke.

I think it led us in an absolutely dreadful situation strategically, economics included. Britain might have the last word on this one.

They had passed a special tax law to go after Big Tech’s dodgy tax avoidance schemes. It was suspended after Joe Biden’s worldwide minimum corporate tax law, which achieves the same ends (and is not myopically fixated on tech, when IKEA or Starbucks have been doing the same for decades).

This is different, it’s rent-seeking news conglomerates like Murdoch successfully lobbying the EU to extend copyright to cover news snippets. Sadly France was one of the countries that pushed the most for this to happen at the EU level, so it is not surprising it would be the first to use the new law as a cudgel.

Yes, countries are soverign, and can (in many cases) do what they like.

You can in principle go to a group like the WTO. Google could of course also just stop operating in France.

So what stops countries like France just stripping all the assets of Google that they can access from France? If they can fine 500m why not fine a billion? What limits them if they don’t care? It’s mostly Americans’ money - not their citizens.

I don’t understand why Google doesn’t just take their ball and go home if the French are going to treat them like this. Why operate in a market where they'll bleed you whenever they want?

Google doesn't pay much taxes in France, the fine is probably lower than what they should have paid is they weren't cheating the system already. This is fair game.

Fine!

This is peanuts for Google.

This seems like a fine that an appeal can successfully overturn.

How so?

This looks like a fine punishing Google for not agreeing to pay a large amount of money for snippets. I’m guessing good faith to the regulators would mean giving in to the news agencies demands.

> I’m guessing good faith to the regulators would mean giving in to the news agencies demands.

No, it's about including all market players and not only some segments, actually releasing proper revenue data and agreeing to negociate on neighbouring rights rather than just Google Showcase.

Google is intentionaly stalling negociations on neighbouring rights because they don't agree with their existence. Last time, they took a slap on the wrist. As they didn't get it, the regulator is now less kindly reminding them that they don't get to choose which laws apply to them.

Hmm, time to exit France?

> The U.S. tech group must now come up with proposals within the next two months on how it would compensate news agencies and other publishers for the use of their news. If it does not do that, the company would face additional fines of up to 900,000 euros per day.

> Google said it was very disappointed with the decision but would comply.

Yes please, that would be fun and stimulating. But alas I doubt it gonna happen.

Bing, Baidu and Yandex getting ride of the extremely dominant search market leader in one of the world richest country for the cost of a small agreement with newspapers.

That would indeed be fun and stimulating.

Maybe this would be a good interim way to address global tax.

1) BigCo acts in a way which attracts significant local fine.

2) Country/ies in question fines them a representative amount of local tax for a company earning £X revenue in that country/ies

Why not? Any government with a sufficiently large market has the giant corporations by the short and curlies. Just keep fining them, it’s free money and what are they going to do? Exit the French market? Lol. Just an import tariff by another name.

That's like cost of doing business rather that a fine. The fine should cause this company to restructure at very least and ideally to split. 500 min is a spare change.

I don't feel any love for main stream media, but it's super nice to see a big fine to the IMO crappy company Google that clearly deserves it.

Google is bad for business in Europe.

> Google is bad for business in Europe.

If they really think that why not just ask it to leave entirely? Or might as well keep fining until they go and then you’ll get their money and get them to leave.

> If they really think that why not just ask it to leave entirely?

I don't think that the french authorities think that, it is just my personal opinion. But it is good that at least some european authorities starts to kick back on their anti-competitive behavior.

Because the EU is pro free trade? They just want everyone to follow the same laws which US tech giants often refuse to do.

> Because the EU is pro free trade?

I thought the EU was famously protectionist? Let's be honest - part of the reason France doesn't like Google is because it's American. There's a jealous and xenophobic aspect to this story.

"Americanophobia", or whatever you'd call it, isn't real in France. It doesn't exist. People hate Google because it's arrogant, sleazy, utterly contemptuous of the law - not because it's American. It's still behind companies like Über or Amazon, though.

Obviously not all French people are anti-American, and paradoxically the French love McDonalds, but it certainly exists. Here's the research and the context on why it's like that:

https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/meunierces...

> France is the country with the deepest, most sedimented reservoir of anti-American arguments.

This is an example of what the author calls '“Sovereignist” anti-Americanism'.

I have to dispute that qualifier. The French school of strategic thinking, which I think really is, or should be, the subject of the paper is only anti-American insofar as America is the dominant power. It's anti-Russian in a context where Russian is the dominant power, or anti-Chinese, or anti-Maltese and so on. If you go to the roots of it, you'd see it's really anti-Hapsburgian originally.

Other points are minor, not really worth considering and within the normal variance of interactions between cultures. It's not any worse than how French people consider say the English or the Italian, probably better.

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