France’s competition watchdog hit Google on Wednesday with another big fine tied to a long-running dispute over payments to French publishers for their news.

The French Competition Authority said it issued the €250 million ($272 million) penalty because of Google’s failure to comply with some commitments it made in a negotiating framework.

The dispute is part of a larger effort by authorities in the EU and around the world to force Google and other tech companies to compensate news publishers for content.

The US tech giant was forced to negotiate with French publishers after a court in 2020 upheld an order saying payments were required by a 2019 EU copyright directive.

Google said in a blog post that it agreed to settle the fine, which was imposed over how it conducted the negotiations, “because it’s time to move on”. It said the fine was “not proportionate” to the issues raised by the French watchdog and “doesn’t sufficiently take into account” Google’s efforts to answer and resolve the concerns.

France was the first of the EU’s 27 nations to adopt the copyright directive, which lays out a way for publishers and news companies to strike licensing deals with online platforms.

Wednesday’s decision by the French Competition Authority is the fourth in as many years against Google for failing to comply with the EU legal framework that aims to establish “necessary conditions for balanced negotiations between press agencies, publishers and digital platforms”.

The watchdog said Google’s AI-powered chatbot Bard — since rebranded under the name Gemini — was trained on content from publishers and news agencies, without notifying them.

The fine is linked to a copyright dispute in France over online content in a case triggered by complaints from some of the country’s biggest news organisations, including Agence France Presse (AFP).

The dispute appeared to be resolved in 2022 when the US tech giant dropped its appeal against an initial 500 million euro fine issued at the end of a major investigation carried out by the Autorite de la Concurrence.

But in Wednesday’s statement, the watchdog said Google violated the terms of four out of seven commitments agreed in the settlement, including conducting negotiations with publishers in good faith and providing transparent information.

The watchdog in particular cited Google’s AI chatbot Bard, launched in 2023, which it said was trained on data from unspecified media outlets and news agencies without the company informing them or the regulator.

“Subsequently, Google linked the use of the content concerned by its artificial intelligence service to the display of protected content”, the watchdog said, adding that in doing so Google hindered the ability of publishers and agencies to negotiate fair prices.

The fine comes as many publishers, writers and newsrooms seek to limit the scraping — or automatic collection of data — by AI services of their online content without their consent of fair compensation. The New York Times in 2023 sued Google rivals Microsoft and OpenAI accusing them of using the newspaper’s articles without permission to help train chatbots.