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| Wanting to avoid a new Spanish law, Google News will close in Spain on December 16, 2014. Image: r.nagy / Shutterstock.com |
In a blog article posted December 11, Google News announced
it will be shutting down in Spain in advance of a law that would require Google
to pay Spanish publishers if their content appeared in search results.
Sometimes called the “Google tax,” the law, passed in
October, requires aggregator services to pay a fee to the Association of
Editors of Spanish Dailies, which represents the Spanish newspaper industry, if
they use even a headline or snippet of an article. Failure could result in fines up to $750,000.
A similar law was recently passed in Germany, without much
success. In that case, Google asked news
publishers to sign liability waivers in order to have article snippets included
in Google News. Where Google News was no
longer allowed to use German news, it was the German news companies that
suffered: German news consortium VG
Media publically stated that if its members did not reinstate Google News,
they were likely to go bankrupt.
The big area of contention seems to be that news agencies
blame Google for their revenue and readership declines. However, Google states that it actually sends
valuable traffic to traditional news outlets via Google News.
“As Google News itself makes no money,” said
the December 11 blog article, “this new approach [to Spanish news] is not
sustainable. So it’s with real sadness
that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January), we’ll
remove Spanish publishers from Google News and close Google News in Spain.”
Jeremy
Malcolm, senior global policy analyst at digital-rights advocate Electronic
Frontier Foundation, said "it is hard to see what value this has achieved
for the press in Spain or for Spanish (and Spanish speaking) Internet
users." He also said the EFF is
worried about the broader implications of this sort of law, which could erode
the right to link.
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