Two antitrust lawsuits that accused Amazon and five big book publishers of illegally conspiring to fix prices of traditional and electronic books in the United States were dismissed on Thursday by a federal judge. The five book publishers targeted by the two lawsuits were Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Penguin Random House. The…

SYDNEY—Australian small publishers will get a leg up in their fight to secure licensing deals with Google and Facebook after the country’s richest person said his philanthropic organisation would seek a collective bargaining arrangement for them. The Minderoo Foundation, owned by Andrew Forrest, chairman of iron ore miner Fortescue Metals Group, plans to help 18…

PARIS—France’s competition regulator fined Google 500 million euros ($592 million) on Tuesday for failing to negotiate in good faith with French publishers in a dispute over payments for their news. The agency threatened fines of another 900,000 euros (around $1 million) per day if Google doesn’t come up with proposals within two months on how…

MILAN—Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Wednesday it had sealed agreements with various Italian publishers to offer access to some of their content on the U.S. tech giant’s Showcase news platform. Google News Showcase is a global vehicle to pay news publishers for their content online and a new service that would allow partnering publishers to…