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?
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
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.
I'm not the biggest Google fan but the precedents being set here are ridiculous.
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.
https://m.dw.com/en/france-fines-google-500-million-in-news-...
The detail has been 'found' to match that high level sentiment.
It's basically corruption no matter how you see it.
That probably got a hearty laugh, or at the very least a chuckle, from anybody familiar with French media.
[1]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-13/google-sa...