Poland's UOKiK raises objections against Google over payments to press publishers

Poland's competition authority has raised formal objections against four Google group companies, alleging that Google may have abused a dominant position in negotiations with Polish press publishers over payment for the use of their articles in search results, Google News and Google Discover. The President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) announced the objections on 8 October, according to the authority's statement.

The objections are addressed to Alphabet Inc, the group's parent; Google LLC, which previously operated the Google search engine in the European Economic Area; Google Ireland Limited, which operates it now; and Google Poland, which sells online advertising space. The liability of each company will be analysed in the proceedings, and the maximum fine for abuse of a dominant position is 10 per cent of an undertaking's turnover, UOKiK said. The objections are an allegation, not a finding.

The information gap

The case rests on Poland's 2024 amendment to its copyright law, which implemented the EU's Directive 2019/790 on copyright in the Digital Single Market. The amendment lets online services use press publications in return for remuneration, requires a platform to agree terms with a publisher, and obliges the platform to give the publisher the information needed to determine the amount, according to the statement.

UOKiK says Google has not reached agreements with most Polish press publishers. According to information held by the authority, when Google proposed remuneration it did not provide the data required by law to assess the rates offered: it did not indicate how it uses press publications or the revenue it derives from them, did not explain the parameters of its calculation, and did not provide documents to verify the underlying assumptions. That created an information asymmetry, leaving publishers unable to judge whether an offer was worthwhile or to make a counter-proposal backed by data, the authority said.

"The lack of this data led to a situation in which the negotiations became negotiations in name only and were aimed at allowing the dominant market player to impose its terms," Tomasz Chróstny, President of UOKiK, said in the statement.

The authority's theory of harm is that publishers depend on the platform to reach readers but lack comparable bargaining power or full knowledge of the value of their content, so a dominant platform may be able to impose rates and other terms, with the result that the mechanism created by the law may not work as intended, UOKiK said. Its statement also points to the shift in how readers use search, with users increasingly stopping at news excerpts or AI-generated summaries instead of clicking through, while advertising next to those results earns revenue for the platform.

Who decides the price

UOKiK stresses that it is not a party to the negotiations and does not assess whether any proposed rate is appropriate. Under the law, if the parties fail to agree, the President of the Office of Electronic Communications may set the remuneration, the statement says. The competition case is about the conduct of the negotiations, in particular the withholding of data, rather than the level of payment.

The authority also drew a line between its case and the European Commission's. The Commission opened formal proceedings in December 2025 to determine whether Google uses publishers' content in AI-based services without appropriate remuneration and without giving them the opportunity to object. The Polish case covers search results, Google News and Discover rather than AI services, and the two proceedings are independent, as agreed with the Commission before UOKiK opened its case, according to UOKiK.

A wider Big Tech docket

The Google objections add to UOKiK's other cases involving large technology companies. Its proceedings against Apple, over whether it acted against publishers of competing mobile apps under the guise of protecting user privacy, are in their final stage, the authority says, and it has published the charges. It is also conducting explanatory proceedings into Meta's practices and changes to how links to press publications are displayed, according to its earlier notice.

For regulators in other markets that have written publisher remuneration into law, the case shows a competition authority using the statutory duty to share information as the hook for an abuse case, leaving the price itself to a separate regulator.