France and Google are playing a delicate game of brinkmanship in the courts of Europe, and it still isn’t clear who’ll come off worse. France fined the search company €150,000 ($200,000) last month as a penalty for failing to tell French citizens exactly what happens to their personal data. Google could have coughed up the trivial sum and drowned its sorrows in a bottle of beaujolais, but instead it has decided to fight — not because of the money, but because accepting the fine would have also involved making a public admission of guilt (published below the search button in a size 13 font, no less) and the company feels this would have “irreparably damaged” its reputation. Google’s legal appeal against the fine appears to rest on creating a rift between France and the European Union, because it claims its privacy policy meets EU requirements and shouldn’t have to be amended to suit one European country.