Unfortunately, the article doesn't explain what is the dispute between Google and France. A link to from the article to another one answers it:
At issue is an update to Google's privacy policy that went into effect on March 1, 2012. The revamp consolidated 70 or so privacy policies across Google's products down to one. But with this change, Google also switched to one profile for users across all services rather than separate logins for offerings like YouTube, Search, and Blogger.