French Competition Authority Fines Google €250M for Breaching Commitments

The French Competition Authority (Autorité de la concurrence) has finedGoogle €250 million for failing to comply with commitments made in June 2022. The Autorité found that Google breached its commitment to cooperate with the monitoring trustee and failed to comply with four of its seven commitments aimed at ensuring good faith negotiations and transparent assessment of remuneration for related rights.

Regarding Google's AI service "Bard," the Autorité discovered that it had used content from press agencies and publishers to train its foundation model without notification. The Autorité stated that "Google subsequently linked the use by its artificial intelligence service of the content concerned to the display of protected content, by failing to propose a technical solution for press agencies and publishers to opt out of the use of their content by Bard without affecting the display of content protected by related rights on other Google services."

The Autorité noted that "Google severely limited the communication of data on the revenues generated by queries triggered by the display of protected content, even though such data would appear useful for assessing indirect revenues." Google did not contest the facts and benefited from the settlement procedure, proposing corrective measures to address the identified breaches.