France orders Meta back to talks with news publishers over content payments

Meta has been told to go back and talk to France’s newspapers about money. On Wednesday, the country’s competition regulator ordered the company to reopen negotiations with news publishers over payment for their content, after an earlier round of talks fell apart.

The order comes with a stopwatch attached. The Autorité de la concurrence gave the owner of Facebook and Instagram 15 days to spell out the details of its payment plan, which is not long for a dispute that has already dragged on.

It landed because publishers complained. French media groups took their grievance to the regulator once negotiations with Meta collapsed, leaving the question of who pays what unresolved. At the centre of it is a European idea called neighbouring rights.

In plain terms, it lets news outlets ask for payment when a platform makes use of their journalism, and it has already produced a bruising ruling against Meta at the EU’s top court.

The roll call of complainants reads like a French newsstand. It runs from television companies to titles including Le Figaro, Lagardère, L’Express, La Dépêche, Libération, Radio France and Centre France.

The regulator’s choice of words is what gives the order teeth. By calling Meta’s way of calculating fees a probable abuse of its dominant position, it lifts the fight out of commercial haggling and into competition law, where the penalties get serious.

France has never been shy on this front. Its watchdog previously fined Google €250m over the use of publishers’ content, a fair measure of how seriously Paris treats the question of who pays for the news. It has form on this precise right, too.

France was among the first countries to write the EU’s 2019 copyright directive into national law, and it has policed the result harder than most of its neighbours. The fight was never only about Meta. Google spent years tangling with the same rules, at one point offering concessions on how it ranks news to head off further trouble from Brussels.

For Meta, this piles onto an already crowded European docket. The company is fighting the EU over how it runs targeted advertising, and the publisher row opens a fresh front on a different corner of the business.

The disagreement is as much about method as money. Publishers say Meta has built its fee calculations to keep what it owes as low as it can, while the platform has balked at terms it considers unworkable.

Meta’s broader attitude has not helped its case. It has spent recent years playing down news across its apps, insisting most people do not come to Facebook for it, which has hardened its reluctance to pay for something it claims not to need.

The 15-day clock forces a decision. Meta has to put a real proposal on the table rather than let the talks drift, and the regulator has kept the threat of formal sanctions within easy reach. What happens next turns on whether the two sides can settle on a number. If they cannot, that abuse finding hands the authority a path to fines that would dwarf whatever payment the publishers were chasing.

The stakes reach well beyond France. Neighbouring rights exist across the EU, so a French precedent on how platforms must calculate payments would be read closely by publishers and regulators elsewhere.

None of this is unique to France, either. Similar fights over publisher pay have run from Australia to Canada, but France has tended to move first and lean hardest, which is part of why its rulings travel.

For the newspapers, the money is anything but a nicety. Print advertising has been draining away for two decades, and payments from the platforms that carry their journalism have become a real line on shrinking accounts.m