French regulators have slapped Google with a €250 million fine for failing to comply with previous commitments on payments to media companies.
In 2020, France's competition authority, the Autorité de la Concurrence, issued a series of injunctions against the company, but the following year fined it €500 million for failing to comply. Google responded by proposing a series of commitments, which were accepted by the authority, with Accuracy appointed as a monitoring trustee to monitor and oversee their implementation.that Google has failed to comply with four of the seven commitments.
The use of news content to train AIs has become a contentious one of late, with the New York Times suing OpenAI and Microsoft over the issue late last year. And the French authority says it has particular concerns over Google Bard—now called Gemini—the AI launched by the company last summer.
The question of whether the use of press publications as part of an AI service qualifies for protection under related rights regulations hasn't yet been settled—but the authority says it's concluded that Google breached one of its commitments by failing to inform publishers that Bard was using their content.