Competition Law strengthening the failure of the new publishers’ rights: is it fair?

In October 2019 France became the first EU country to implement and apply article 15 of the DSM Directive. If the goal of article 15 was to make “the licensing and enforcement of rights in press publications” less complex and more efficient (recital 54), the first application of the French publisher right is likely to be seen as a failure by news publishers. However, recent developments have indicated that competition law might be able to alter this by changing the rule and forcing Google to negotiate.