On Wednesday, France's Competition Authority announced that it had fined Alphabet's Google €250 million (a little under $272 million in US dollars).
The tech giant was penalized by the European nation for breaches linked to EU intellectual property (IP) rules, regarding the company's AI services, reports Reuters.
According to Le Monde, the French Competition Authority stated that the fine was imposed due to Google allegedly "failing to respect commitments made in June 2022" and not negotiating in "good faith" with various media outlets when discussing compensation for using their content in the company's AI products.
France is the first EU country to apply a new form of copyright legislation, adopted by the EU in 2019, called "neighboring rights," which allows media companies to demand compensation from companies behind AI models that use the companies' content.
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The fine stems from a dispute that originally started in 2019 when organizations representing French magazines and newspapers filed a complaint with the regulatory authority. That case was settled in 2022, when French regulators and Google agreed on a set of commitments for fair negotiations that Google was to adhere to.
It is these commitments that Google allegedly failed to respect.
Google has pledged not to contest the facts.