France slaps €250 million fine on Google | A look at the tech giant's rocky road with Paris

France’s Competition Authority on Wednesday (local time) slapped a €250 million ($272 million) fine on Google. The regulator said this was due to the US-based company breaching an agreement signed in 2022.

The agreement set out the terms for paying media companies for reproducing their content online. Authorities in Paris also alleged that Google did not negotiate in “good faith” with news publishers on how much the remuneration for the use of their content would be.

This is the latest in one of the many penalties that French authorities have levied on Google in recent years.

Paris’ punitive actions against the tech titan have been focused largely around data protection and copyright issues. Here’s a timeline of some recent fines the Sundar Pichai-led company has been asked to pay:

• In July, 2023, France’s Competition, Consumer and Anti-Fraud Office imposed a €2 million ($2.2 million) fine on Google. This penalty was over incomplete results in its search engine and app store. The authority said Google’s search engine lacked information concerning the ranking criteria of results. It also said that the Google Play Store lacked information on the ranking criteria of results, payment information, and dispute resolution procedures.

• In January, 2022, France’s data protection watchdog, Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) said it had fined Google a record €150 million for making it difficult for internet users to refuse cookies. The watchdog said google.fr websites did not allow the easy refusal of cookies, even though accepting them was made very simple.

• In July, 2021, France’s antitrust watchdog levied a €500 million ($593 million) penalty on Google. The Competition Authority said that Google had failed to comply with the regulator’s orders on the process of conducting talks with the country’s news publishers in a copyright row.Google was accused of breaching a ruling from the previous year that ordered it to conduct “good faith” negotiations for licensing deals with publishers and news agencies for any reuse of copyrighted content.Online platforms such as Google have been accused of profiting from news content without compensating the news providers. To enable print media to demand payment for the use of their content, the European Union introduced a form of copyright known as “neighbouring rights”. France has been a testing ground for these rules.

• In December 2020, CNIL ordered Google to pay €100 million as a fine for breaching Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act. The Silicon Valley giant was fined for placing tracking cookies on its French users’ computers “without obtaining prior consent and without providing adequate information." Cookies allow companies to “follow” their users around the internet so that they can serve them with personalised ads.Google was also fined for tracking users who had specifically deactivated ad personalisation.

• In January 2019, Google was fined nearly €57 million by French regulators for violating Europe’s new General Data Protection Regulation that took effect in 2018. Later, in March that year, European authorities slapped another €1.5 billion ($1.7 billion) penalty on Google for antitrust violations in the online advertising market. The fine was the third against Google by the European Union since 2017.

With inputs from agencies