PARIS: The head of France’s antitrust authority, Isabelle de Silva, said on Thursday that a tentative agreement between Google and some French publications about paying for news material will be decided in the coming days. According to documents obtained by Reuters, Google agreed in January to pay a total of US$76 million to 121 publications under a three-year framework deal inked by Google and the Alliance de la presse d’information generale (APIG), a lobby organization representing most major French publishers.
It’s one of the most high-profile partnerships in Google’s “News Showcase” pay scheme for news snippets displayed in search results, and it’s the first of its type in Europe.
According to Reuters, Google has not signed an individual licensing arrangement with an APIG member since then, and talks are effectively halted pending the antitrust verdict.
(Mathieu Rosemain contributed reporting, and Sudip Kar-Gupta edited the piece.)
Reuters is the source of this information./n
