The French Competition Authority said it “requires Google, within three months, to conduct negotiations in good faith with publishers and news agencies on the remuneration for the re-use of their protected contents”.

“This injunction requires that the negotiations effectively result in a proposal for remuneration from Google” that must be applied from October 2019, when France became the first country to implement the law.

The rule on “neighbouring rights” is intended to ensure that news publishers are compensated when their work appears on websites, social media platforms and search engines.

The regulator said the practices of Google “were likely to constitute an abuse of a dominant position, and caused serious and immediate harm to the press sector”.

Google previously dismissed the claims of the media groups but had promised to co-operate with the regulator.

“Google helps internet users find news content from many sources and the results are always based on relevance, not trade agreements,” it told AFP last year.

“The law does not impose a fee for posting links, and European news publishers already derive significant value from the eight billion visits they receive each month from internet users who do searches on Google,” it said.

The regulator questioned the tech giant’s position that no remuneration would be paid for the display of protected content.

It said: “This choice seems difficult to reconcile with the purpose and scope of the law, which aimed to redefine the sharing of value in favour of press publishers vis-à-vis platforms, by assigning a neighbouring right which must give rise to remuneration…”