A French competition authority found that Google had trained its artificial intelligence, known as Bard, on copyrighted news articles without providing publishers with sufficient information about compensation or the opportunity to opt out of the process.
The competition authority in France fined Google, its parent company Alphabet, and two subsidiaries a total of 250 million euros (equivalent to 271 million dollars) for violating a previous agreement related to using copyrighted content for training its artificial intelligence service, now known as Gemini.
On Wednesday, the competition authority stated that the search giant failed to comply with the settlement reached in June 2022 regarding the use of news stories in its search results and news pages. Google avoided a fine at that time by committing to negotiate in good faith about compensation with news providers for their content, among other steps.
Specifically, as mentioned by the authority, Google agreed to provide news agencies and publishers with a “transparent assessment” of their compensation for usage rights and ensure that negotiations did not affect “other economic relationships” between Google and publishers.
However, Google failed to fulfill its commitments in several ways, according to the authority. Firstly, Google was not transparent enough in sharing information with its representatives, as it failed to provide necessary information for monitoring the agreement in a timely manner. Secondly, the company did not provide complete details on how it profited from news content, also violating its commitments for 2022.
In the end, authorities accused Google of using news content to train its artificial intelligence service, now called Gemini, without obtaining permission from publishers and without providing a tool for objection that would enable publishers to object to the use of artificial intelligence.
The authority noted that Google’s failure to notify publishers and news agencies about the use of their content by its Bard service constituted a breach of its transparency commitment, as stated in the authority’s statement.
Google did not provide publishers with a tool to opt out of using their materials in training the Bard program until September 2023 when Google launched the “Extended Google” service. Until that moment, the regulatory authority said the only available option for publishers was to block all Google services from indexing their websites, including search services, Discover service, and news services.
In response to the authority’s ruling, Google issued an official statement on its blog saying it found the fine “inappropriate,” but it would pay it instead of appealing, stating, “It’s time to turn the page.”
In a previous ruling in the same case, in July 2021, authorities imposed a fine of 500 million euros on Google for practices that could harm the press sector.
