France's competition watchdog hits Google with €250m fine
France's competition watchdog hits Google with €250m fine
The French competition watchdog has fined Google €250 million for breaches of EU intellectual property rules and failing to uphold agreements with French publishers and news agencies.
More "cost of doing business" fines...
It's protection money.
I'll cheer when fines become calculated as a fat percentage of previous year's earnings.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The French Competition Authority said Google trained its artificial intelligence-powered Bard chatbot, since rebranded as Gemini, on content from publishers and news agencies without notifying them.
Google called Wednesday's fine disproportionate, and said the watchdog had not sufficiently taken into account its efforts "in an environment where it's very hard to set a course because we can’t predict which way the wind will blow next."
The fine comes as many publishers, writers and newsrooms seek to limit the automatic collection of their content by AI services without their consent.
Spain's competition watchdog last year began an investigation for alleged anti-competitive practices affecting news agencies and press publications.
In 2022, Germany's antitrust regulator shelved an investigation into Google's News Showcase service, after the tech giant made "important adjustments" to ease competition concerns.
The New York Times in 2023 sued Google rivals Microsoft and OpenAI, the creator of the popular artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT, accusing them of using millions of the newspaper's articles without permission to help train chatbots.
The original article contains 294 words, the summary contains 164 words. Saved 44%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!