Report from Reuters
In Brief – France’s competition authority has ordered Meta Platforms to submit a media payments proposal and resume negotiations with French media groups over more than a year of unpaid fees for the use of news content on its platforms. The dispute, brought by French media associations DVP and APIG, centers on the EU’s “neighboring rights” rules, which entitle publishers to seek compensation from digital platforms and search engines when their content is used digitally. A previous licensing agreement between Meta and the media companies expired in 2024 and the media companies alleged that Meta was not negotiating in good faith. The competition authority said Meta had likely abused its dominant market position and concluded that the lack of payments since 2025 had caused financial harm to publishers, despite their content continuing to appear on Meta’s services. Meta said it disagreed with the authority’s findings but would participate in the process to reach a fair agreement with DVP and APIG.
Context – Media companies have been lobbying their governments to compel Google and Meta to pay them when news content appears on the platforms. Australia and France were the most responsive. The Australian model was to impose licensing rates on Google and Meta through a government arbiter. France used the neighboring rights provision of the 2019 EU Copyright Directive and the threat of antitrust sanctions to force Google to pay when “snippets” were used in search results. While Google has generally agreed to pay tolls, Meta eventually broke ranks, blocking news in Canada rather than comply with their Australia-style regime and ending snippets for media posts in Poland to avoid neighboring rights payments. The EU Court of Justice recently ruled that member states could create regulatory regimes to determine neighboring rights licensing fees but also appeared to back the right of platforms to end the use of snippets to avoid payments, so Meta could press that option in France. In Australia, the government plans for a new digital services tax aimed at Meta if they won’t pay media.