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Google News to shut down in Spain

googlepolicyeurope.blogspot.com

1–10 of 272 posts

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#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.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#3
TL;DR: 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. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#4

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)

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#5
Things are getting pretty freaky around here in Spain. We've got some horrible (freedom-wise) laws passed recently and we're all angry about them. They've been trying to for several years, and now that people is tired of fighting these stupid laws back they can pass them. This basically means that Google would need to pay to index newspapers.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#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?

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#7
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.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#8

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 publish open access give bargaining power to the researchers over oligopolies like Nature and Science.

Re: Google News to shut down in Spain

#10
Why can't the just display the headline and no snippet from the article text? Or does that count as a snippet? But wait... what about the actual organic search results? Do they have to remove Spanish news articles from that too?
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