[asuffield]

That was a voluntary settlement - details are here: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/feb/01/google-52m...

The bottom line is that Google would rather do business than not, and £52m is not a painful expense for them here. I'm pretty sure that no European court could rule a company was obliged to engage in a transaction against its will, and would be unable to enforce this. Google have shown with China that they are willing to drop a nation if the terms offered are too onerous. They're not a public utility.

[wutbrodo]

If France would never enforce the transaction, then why would Google pay $70m (and why would France say they would enforce the transaction in the first place)? Obviously it was technically voluntary, but if someone does something voluntarily under threat of bogus legal action, I'm really not seeing the difference from a protection racket.

[asuffield]

You'd have to look at the settlement details to find out, but I believe the answer is that the settlement involves a lot of things Google wanted, like high-value adwords placement, and they expect to make a lot more money from that.