Google Starts €60 Million French Digital Publishing Fund

While Google and France don't always get along and agree with certain situations, the search giant is looking to patch things up by creating a €60 million ($82 million USD) fund for digital publishing "innovation" that it says will help French news websites make money off of online advertisements.

While Google doesn't mention anything about a settlement in its blog post, we can only assume that the fund will resolve an ongoing case where news publishers claimed that Google's practice of linking to news articles was copyright infringement. Along with the fund, Google has agreed to give French publishers discounted access to Google's advertising platforms.

Google says that the new innovation fund was announced in France along with France's president, François Hollande. The French government itself has been acting as a mediator for the copyright dispute between Google and French news publishers. However, it seems that the search giant and news outlets in France will live happily ever after for the time being.

This isn't the first time that France and Google and tangoed, though. Back in October, Google threatened the French media that it would take block their search results from Google due to a new law that would force search engines to shell out money for content. And back in August, the company was in trouble with France over Street View data that wasn't deleted, resulting in another cat fight between the two parties.