France fines Google $271 million for training AI on news articles

March 20 (UPI) -- France's competition authority said Wednesday it is fining Google $271 million for training artificial intelligence on news articles without notifying the publishers or the competition authority.

The competition authority said Google's parent company Alphabet Inc., Google LLC, Google Ireland Ltd. and Google France were fined for "breaching its commitment to cooperate with the monitoring trustee and failing to comply with four of its seven commitments" made in 2022.

It said Google failed to negotiate in good faith, based on "transparent, objective and non-discriminatory criteria," failed to provide the publishers with the information needed to assess how much they should be compensated to offer their content and failed to take the necessary measures to ensure that negotiations do not affect other economic relationships between Google and press agencies and publisher.

The authority said specifically that Google did not allow publishers an avenue to opt-out as it tied the display of content on its other services, such as its search engine to, whether or not the content was protected from use by the AI training model.

In 2021 France fined Google $593 million for allegedly ignoring an order to work fairly with publishers for display of news content.

The issue arose because publishers were frustrated with Google using their content without paying for it.