Google News to shut down in Spain • Hacker News Board

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#11

Post by mc32 » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 2:56 AM UTC

magicalist wrote: post #4

jonathansizz wrote: post #2

A pertinent quote from the Guardian article on this story: Germany passed a similar law to Spain’s and Google removed newspapers from Google News in response but in October publishers reached an agreement with the company after traffic to their websites plummeted.

Seems like the difference is they can't come to an agreement with publishers this time: "This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not" (though of course they may be overstating the requirement)

Wow. I imagine this also affects sites like Topix. What a shame. If one wanted to get news from Spain, or any other country with similar laws, how would one search on a topic, DMOZ?

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#12

Post by hggchgfhgfhg » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 2:57 AM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #8

jonathansizz wrote: post #2

A pertinent quote from the Guardian article on this story: Germany passed a similar law to Spain’s and Google removed newspapers from Google News in response but in October publishers reached an agreement with the company after traffic to their websites plummeted.

Can someone comment on the goal behind designing the Spanish law this way? I speculate that they consider Google News to have monopolistic power, so that even if a fair market in snippets would set a finite price Google News would still use its clout to drive that price to zero by removing individual papers who tried to charge. A mandatory price would counter act this, similar to the way that government mandates to p…

To avoid what happened in Germany.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#13

Post by rsync » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:00 AM UTC

Things are going very badly for a global internet if we are discussing a web site "shutting down in spain".

Of course we all know what that means and it seems very sensible in 2014, but remember - if someone had told you in 1998 that a certain website would not be operating in country X, you would have laughed and explained to them (like a child) that the Internet was a single global network and that if one had Internet access at all they would have access to the site in question.

All of that simplicity and innocence has slipped away.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#14

Post by caiob » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:01 AM UTC

Since when Google makes money by putting ads on their sites?

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#15

Post by chetanahuja » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:05 AM UTC

rsync wrote: post #13

Things are going very badly for a global internet if we are discussing a web site "shutting down in spain". Of course we all know what that means and it seems very sensible in 2014, but remember - if someone had told you in 1998 that a certain website would not be operating in country X, you would have laughed and explained to them (like a child) that the Internet was a single global network and that if one had Inter…

Completely agree with the sad trend. Though to be fair, the scourge of geolocation based blocking started with media companies (mostly American, but also bbc and others) in a bid to recreate the DVD region encoding bullshit on the internet. Add to that the NSA merrily slurping up data from the global firehose... there's no innocence left to corrupt at this point.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#16

Post by logicalman » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:06 AM UTC

Can they allow users in Spain to access Google News from a non-Spanish TLD but still serve those results in the Spanish language?

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#17

Post by source99 » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:10 AM UTC

pkaye wrote: post #7

gcb0 wrote: post #6

"we don't make money because we do not advertise on that site" is a huge fallacy. This sounds like a bluff because if that gets traction in the US then their search business will collapse. Imagine $0.01 for every search that shows a snipet of wikipedia to the wiki foundation?

The Google News website doesn't show any banner ads.

But it does lead to sites that likely show ads from google. So technically news.google.com doesn't generate revenue but it does direct traffic to news.spain.commercial.site that is showing google ads along side news.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#18

Post by Raticide » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:13 AM UTC

logicalman wrote: post #16

Can they allow users in Spain to access Google News from a non-Spanish TLD but still serve those results in the Spanish language?

Maybe, but no spanish news sites will be included in the news results, so they'll still be missing a lot of local stuff.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#19

Post by calbear81 » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:14 AM UTC

gcb0 wrote: post #6

"we don't make money because we do not advertise on that site" is a huge fallacy. This sounds like a bluff because if that gets traction in the US then their search business will collapse. Imagine $0.01 for every search that shows a snipet of wikipedia to the wiki foundation?

It's a bit disengenous because although they don't directly make money on the News portal, it reinforces their market position and keeps users in the Google ecosystem. Those users in turn run searches that DO display ads.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#20

Post by cpncrunch » Thu, Dec 11, 2014, 3:15 AM UTC

source99 wrote: post #17

pkaye wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google News website doesn't show any banner ads.

But it does lead to sites that likely show ads from google. So technically news.google.com doesn't generate revenue but it does direct traffic to news.spain.commercial.site that is showing google ads along side news.

...and that website also makes money. Really, this hurts Spanish news websites more than it hurts Google.