Amaya Toman High fines are not avoided even by major technology companies. An example of this week is Google, which is currently facing a fine in the order of hundreds of thousands of euros, due to the fact that it did not agree with French news publishers on the license fees that it should pay them in accordance with European Union regulations. In the second part of our summary of the day today, we will talk about the social network Twitter - for a change, it is currently dealing with inconveniences related to the verification of fake Twitter accounts.
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Google faces fine for publishing content
Google faces the threat of a €500m fine for failing to negotiate royalties with news publishers. The plaintiff is the French Competition Authority. France was one of the first European countries to implement the EU Copyright Directive. The aforementioned directive entered into force in 2019 and allows publishers to demand financial remuneration for the publication of their published content. A coalition of French news publishers filed a complaint with the competition authority against Google, which it says did not comply with the directive. The president of the competition authority, Isabelle de Silva, said in an interview with Politico earlier this week that Google apparently did not accept the directive.
However, according to the president, Google's dominant position does not give it any right to rewrite the given laws, rules and regulations. A spokesperson for Google said in this context that the company is very disappointed by the decision of the French competition authority: "We acted in good faith," he added. According to its management, Google is currently involved in negotiations with the French news agency AFP, which also include licensing agreements.
This is what the first Google Store looks like:
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Twitter admitted to mistakenly verifying fake accounts
Representatives of the social network Twitter said yesterday that they have permanently blocked a small number of fake accounts that were inadvertently verified in the past. The verification of fake Twitter accounts was pointed out by a data scientist who goes by the name Conspirador Norteño on Twitter. He said, among other things, that he managed to detect six fake and at the same time verified Twitter accounts, which were created on June 16 of this year, none of which had ever published a single tweet. Two of these accounts used a stock photo as their profile picture.
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Twitter released a statement yesterday admitting that it had accidentally verified a small number of fake accounts: "We have now permanently disabled these accounts and removed their verification badge," it says in the mentioned official statement. But the incident suggests that Twitter's authentication system can be quite problematic. Twitter relatively recently launched public requests for verification, and set the relevant conditions. According to Twitter, the accounts to be verified should be "authentic and active", a requirement that the said deleted accounts did not meet in the slightest. The six fake accounts mentioned had a combined 976 suspicious followers, with all the follower accounts created between June 19 and 20 this year. Artificially generated profile photos could be found on most of these fake accounts.
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Pavel Jelic 