Aut. conc., Decisions No. 26-MC-01 and 26-MC-02, 8 July 2026
Key points. Following complaints from the Alliance de la presse d’information générale (APIG) and the société des Droits voisins de la presse (DVP), the French Competition Authority (Autorité de la concurrence) has imposed interim measures on Meta[1]. It considers that the practices implemented by the platform during negotiations on remuneration for neighbouring rights (imposing its own valuation method, unilaterally restricting the scope of the negotiation, withholding the information needed for an informed discussion) are capable of constituting an abuse of a dominant position and cause serious and immediate harm to the press sector. Meta is ordered to resume negotiations in good faith on the basis of transparent, objective and non-discriminatory criteria, and to provide, within fifteen days, the information needed to assess the remuneration. Beyond the case at hand, the decision makes transparency an obligation of the dominant operator and consolidates an analytical framework whose transposition to providers of large language models now seems inevitable.
It is well known that the Act of 24 July 2019, transposing Article 15 of Directive (EU) 2019/790, created for press publishers and news agencies a neighbouring right intended to ensure a balanced sharing of the value generated by the reuse of their content by digital platforms[2]. It is equally well known that the effectiveness of this right has, from the outset, been played out less in the field of literary and artistic property than in that of competition law: it was through interim measures that the Authority first compelled Google to negotiate[3], before imposing a heavy penalty for failure to comply with its orders[4], making commitments binding[5], and then penalising breaches of them[6]. Six years after the founding decision, the decisions under review transpose the edifice to Meta. The exercise might have been a mere repetition; it is in fact a deepening. The Authority refines the definition of the fair negotiation required of the dominant operator (I) and calibrates orders whose scope clearly extends beyond the case of Meta (II).
I. Practices capable of constituting an abuse of a dominant position
A. A relevant market and dominance assessed at the plausibility stage
The standard of proof applicable to interim measures does not require an infringement to be established, but rather a finding of practices “capable” of constituting a prohibited practice[7], a plausibility threshold whose application the Paris Court of Appeal had upheld in the Google case[8]. It is at this admittedly undemanding stage that the Authority considers that Meta is likely to hold a dominant position on the market for personal social networking services, including hybrid platforms. The assessment is based on the size of Facebook’s user base, significantly larger than that of its competitors, and on the ability of Meta’s services to cover a particularly wide range of needs and uses.
The market definition adopted deserves attention. By including “hybrid platforms” in the relevant market, the Authority equips itself to capture players whose model combines social networking, messaging and content distribution, and neutralises in advance the invariably raised argument of competitive pressure supposedly exerted by entertainment platforms. The procedural configuration is also noteworthy: the request came from both a trade association and a collective management organisation, confirming the role of collective management as a litigation vehicle for publishers who, taken individually, would have neither the resources nor the appetite for risk needed to take on a global platform.
B. Unfair trading conditions and circumvention of the law: complementary classifications
The classification adopted is twofold, and it is in this duality that the doctrinal contribution of the decisions lies. First, the Authority relies on the classic concept of imposing unfair trading conditions[9], in line with the United Brands case law[10]: Meta allegedly sought to impose its own methodology for assessing remuneration, without examining the alternative methods proposed by APIG and DVP, while excluding as a matter of principle from the scope of the negotiation all of its services disseminating press content, with the sole exception of content posted by users on Facebook. The Authority notes that this unilateral restriction of scope could “weaken the mechanism” of the neighbouring rights legislation. The wording is decisive: it condemns the strategy, common to several platforms, of conceding the principle of remuneration while hollowing out its basis, and prohibits the very definition of the neighbouring right’s basis from becoming an object of market power.
Second, and this is the most significant contribution, the Authority finds that Meta may have circumvented the Act of 24 July 2019 by refusing to provide publishers and agencies with the information needed for an informed discussion, or by providing it only belatedly and in degraded conditions. Information asymmetry lies at the heart of the reasoning: without knowledge of the revenue derived from the use of their content and of the actual uses made of it, publishers are deprived of any ability to assess remuneration proposals objectively, and the rebalancing objective sought by the legislature is defeated.
Circumvention of the law thus emerges, in continuity with the construction begun in 2020, as an autonomous category of abuse, distinct from unfair trading conditions although derived from them. Its features are unusual: the abuse does not lie in a head-on breach of the 2019 Act, which would fall to the ordinary courts to sanction, but in the dominant operator’s use of the conditions of negotiation to deprive the statutory mechanism of its practical effect. The result is a remarkable positive obligation: for the dominant operator, transparency on usage and revenue data is not a negotiating courtesy, but a component of the special responsibility incumbent upon it. The reversal is striking: whereas business secrecy traditionally served as a shield, a dominant position turns it into a source of a disclosure obligation.
II. Calibrated orders with forward-looking scope
A. Serious and immediate harm assessed beyond the interests of the complainants
The serious and immediate harm required by Article L. 464-1 of the Commercial Code is readily established: since the expiry of the agreements concluded in 2021 and 2024, APIG and DVP members have received no remuneration at all, while their content continues to be disseminated on Meta’s services. But the Authority does not stop at the complainants’ financial loss: it stresses that this loss of resources aggravates the precariousness of a sector on which the quality of information depends. The harm to the sector and, implicitly, to pluralism, a public interest consideration running through the entire reasoning, relieves the Authority of having to make its intervention conditional on demonstrating a specific danger to each publisher.
Four orders are issued, in force until the decision on the merits: to negotiate in good faith on the basis of transparent, objective and non-discriminatory criteria, the negotiation having to cover retroactively the period of reuse of content since the beginning of 2025; to provide, within fifteen days, the information needed to assess the remuneration, the precise list of which is set out in the decisions; not to degrade, throughout the negotiation, the display arrangements for the content of APIG and DVP members on all of Meta’s online services; and to send the Authority regular compliance reports. The scheme is remarkably coherent. The retroactive basis prevents the passage of procedural time from benefiting the party liable for the remuneration. As for the order not to degrade display, it neutralises in advance the response Meta had adopted to comparable legislation, notably in Canada, where the group chose to delist news rather than pay for it[11]: the threat of withdrawal, which turns any negotiation into a discussion under duress, is here defused.
B. An analytical framework transposable to language model providers
The significance of the decisions under review must, however, be measured against litigation that is on the horizon: the use of press content by generative artificial intelligence providers. Decision No. 24-D-03 had taken a first step, criticising Google for having used publishers’ content to train its Bard service without informing them, in breach of its transparency obligation[12].
The Meta decisions complete the edifice by systematising the triad: dominant position, withholding of information on uses and revenue, and unilateral imposition of a remuneration method and basis.
Each of these elements finds an immediate echo in the largely embryonic negotiations between publishers and providers of large language models. Information asymmetry is even more radical there: the publisher does not know which content was ingested during training, to what extent it feeds the generated answers, in particular through retrieval-augmented generation, or what revenue is derived from it. Remuneration methods, where they exist, consist of unilateral flat-rate offers, with no transparency as to their underlying factors. As for scope, the argument that certain uses (model training, generation of summaries) fall outside the neighbouring rights regime reproduces exactly the strategy of restricting the basis that the Authority condemns in Meta’s case.
The question of how training uses should be classified under Articles L. 218-1 et seq. of the Intellectual Property Code admittedly remains disputed. But the contribution of the decisions under review is precisely to show that competition law makes it possible to sidestep this controversy: what is targeted is not the use itself, but the unfair conditions under which it is negotiated. The debate over the basis is thus brought back into the negotiation, under the Authority’s supervision, rather than constituting an insurmountable precondition to it. And it may be thought that neither the entry into application of the Digital Markets Act nor the instruments specific to the Artificial Intelligence Act will deprive this route of its value: none of these texts provides, with the speed of interim measures, for the rebalancing of an ongoing commercial negotiation.
The usual caveat remains: interim measures prejudge neither the final classification of the practices nor the outcome of the investigation on the merits, and an appeal to the Paris Court of Appeal remains open, although the Google precedent shows that this is a delicate route for the platform. The fact remains that, for the third time in six years, the Authority is making competition law the instrument that gives neighbouring rights their effect. Language model providers would be well advised to draw the consequences before the question is put to them in the same terms.
[1]Aut. conc., Decisions No. 26-MC-01 and No. 26-MC-02 of 8 July 2026 concerning requests for interim measures submitted by the Alliance de la presse d’information générale and by the société des Droits voisins de la presse.
[2]Act No. 2019-775 of 24 July 2019 creating a neighbouring right for news agencies and press publishers, transposing Art. 15 of Directive (EU) 2019/790 of 17 April 2019; CPI, Art. L. 218-1 et seq.
[3]Aut. conc., Decision No. 20-MC-01 of 9 April 2020, upheld by Paris, pôle 5, ch. 7, 8 October 2020, No. 20/08071.
[4]Aut. conc., Decision No. 21-D-17 of 12 July 2021 (fine of 500 million euros for failure to comply with the orders).
[5]Aut. conc., Decision No. 22-D-13 of 21 June 2022 (commitments made binding).
[6]Aut. conc., Decision No. 24-D-03 of 15 March 2024 (fine of 250 million euros for failure to comply with the commitments, noting in particular the use of press content to train the artificial intelligence service Bard, now Gemini, without informing publishers).
[7]C. com., Art. L. 464-1.
[8]Paris, pôle 5, ch. 7, 8 October 2020, No. 20/08071, cited above.
[9]C. com., Art. L. 420-2; TFEU, Art. 102.
[10]ECJ, 14 February 1978, United Brands, Case 27/76.
[11]Following the adoption of the Canadian Online News Act (Bill C-18), Meta stopped making news content available on its services in Canada from August 2023.
[12]Decision No. 24-D-03 of 15 March 2024, cited above.
