Google News, the service created in the wake of 9/11 to aggregate world news in one simple, easy-to-compare place, closed its doors to Spanish media sources this morning thanks to a new law scheduled to take affect on January 1.
The service is affected by a new Spanish law that requires every Spanish publication to charge news aggregates like Google News a “tax” for showing any part of their publication. As Google has never charged or allowed for advertising on Google News, the company decided that “the new approach was not sustainable” and instead displayed an apology to users who tried to access the service today.
This isn’t the first time that Google News has found itself on the wrong side of a law. Last year, Google stopped automatically indexing news in Germany, asked sites to opt in to have their content displayed and displaying only the headlines (not photos or descriptions) from sites owned by the large German publisher Axel Springer.
Unsurprisingly, not getting equally indexed on Google News hurt the publisher quite a bit. The terms were renegotiated and a spokesperson admitted that the company had “shot itself out of the market.”
The German law, however, allowed news publishers to opt in to Google’s indexing, allowing them to absolve Google of paying for content. The Spanish law has no such provision: Spanish publishers can’t even ask Google to host their content on Google News if they want to.
There has, of course, been pushback, even from some unexpected sources. A recent statement by a spokeswoman for the The Spanish Association of Daily Newspaper Publishers (AEDE), who pushed for the legislation to be passed, indicated that the group may be nervous that the law may remove publishers from Google’s actual search results.
Forbes’ Tim Worstall explains:
Because the way the law is written it’s not clear at all that this applies only to Google News. AEDE is at least worrying that it applies to the general index as well. That still shows headlines, still shows snippets of the content. And under at least one reading of the law this must still be paid for by Google. And believe me, traffic from the general index is a great deal more important to newspaper publishers than the traffic from Google News is.
No word yet on how strictly the law will be interpreted (or how it’ll affect future Eurozone regulation), but I, for one, am pretty eager to see how everything plays out.
Read more over at Bloomberg.
