French Minister: The 4.6 billion euros fine on Google should be deducted from the investment

According to a report by Phoenix Technology citing Reuters, French Minister for European Affairs Benjamin Haddad stated on Tuesday that the European Union should use the billions of euros in fines imposed on Google to reduce member states' contributions to the EU budget. Haddad, in an interview with a French news channel, said: "This is a new source of income for the EU, amounting to 4.6 billion euros, and this funding should be used to automatically lower the contributions of all member states."

In July of this year, Google was fined a total of 890 million euros for violating EU regulations aimed at curbing the power of large tech companies, equivalent to about 1.01 billion dollars. The recent fines have brought the total amount of fines imposed on Google by the EU for anti-competitive behavior over the past two decades to 10.38 billion euros. EU countries are currently negotiating the budget for 2028 to 2034, with the European Commission proposing a budget scale of 2 trillion euros, accounting for 1.26% of the EU's gross national income, of which about 168 billion euros will be used to repay loans raised for the post-pandemic recovery fund.