The penalty could be up to 10 percent of Google’s annual revenue.
A Polish regulator said that Google isn’t playing by the rules when the tech giant displays articles from local media publishers in Google Search, Google News and Google Discover. Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection, abbreviated as UOKiK, said that Google leaned on its dominant market position and failed to provide necessary data when negotiating compensation with the country’s news publishers.
Tomasz Chróstny, president of UOKiK, said in a press release that there were rules that clearly laid out what info Google was required to provide to publishers to figure out proper compensation and that the company still failed to do so. The agency could hit the company with a fine amounting to up to 10 percent of Google’s annual revenue, according to Chróstny. We reached out to Google for comment and will update the story if we hear back.
Like the UOKiK, the European Commission previously opened an antitrust investigation against Google, looking at if the company offered appropriate compensation for articles used in its AI Overview or AI Mode features. Prior to Google, the Polish authority also accused Apple of using its App Tracking Transparency feature of creating unfair competition in the personalized ads market.
