In recent months, Facebook and Google have been criticized for putting news publishers out of business with their massive hold on the advertising market. The Search Engine giant was fined £427m (€500m) by the French competition regulator in the fight between the tech giant and news publishers.
The watchdog has threatened to impose extra penalties of £769,000 (€900,000) daily if Google does not come up with proposals in the coming two months for compensation of the news publishers.
This action comes amid global worry of the impact Facebook and Google have on news publishers, with most being suppressed and go out of business due to the effective duopoly’s control on the advertising market.
Earlier in 2021, the French regulator issued the tech giant with an order to discuss with news publishers, and the fine on July 13, 2021, comes as part of the decision that Google had already breached those instructions.
Google France is ‘very disappointed’ by the decision and it complained that it did not reflect the efforts that are set in place or the reality of the use of news content on their platform.
The company confirmed that it was negotiating a solution with the publishers in good faith appears to be almost reaching a viable agreement. It comes after a review commissioned by the government and published in February 2019 that found Google and Facebook had a negative impact on British news media since they captured a lot of the online advertising revenue.
Earlier in the year, Facebook unleashed its Facebook News tab in the United Kingdom after it completed deals with most of the nation’s major news providers like the Financial Times, Sky News, and The Guardian.
The plan has now been reported to probably bring in millions of pounds for the biggest organizations who have signed licenses enabling Facebook to display their previews and headlines of their articles.
These licenses come on the contrary to the headlines and article previews visible on Google Search that have been criticized for replicating the news publications’ work without paying them, to the point that the service has been banned in Spain.
But a senior executive at Facebook was compelled to defend its decision to block access to news media in Australia earlier in 2021 as similar plans in the nation stalled. They said that the decision was taken with ‘a heavy heart’ after Facebook was described as a ‘schoolyard bully’ running a ‘bulldozer’ over democracy when it made the move as opposed to paying to run publishers’ content.
This block was reversed shortly thereafter.
