Google scraps its news service in Spain
Google has decided to stop offering its Google News service in Spain after the government there decided to revamp its copyright laws, giving media companies the right to be remunerated by news aggregators.
Rather than pay Spanish newspapers to publish excerpts and post links to Google News, the search engine giant has decided it’s better to just close up shop completely. “As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable,” said Google in its European policy blog.
That’s actually a rather questionable claim. Although it doesn’t run any ads inside Google News, its former employee and current Yahoo! Inc. CEO Marissa Mayer said back in 2008 that Google News was a “$100m search referral engine”.
Germany introduced a similar clause in its own copyright law last year, known as the “Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverlege” (or “Lex Google”). The clause made it illegal for news aggregators to publish excerpts from German newspapers without paying them a fee for doing so. Naturally Google declined, and instead gave media organizations a chance to “opt in” without the fees, or have their headlines omitted from Google News. While a few organizations refused to opt in at first, most later gave in to Google’s demand and waived the fee requirement to be included in Google News.
The Axel Springer publishing house was one of the last publishers to hold out in Germany, but in the end it waived the fees to ensure it still appears in Europe’s only search engine that counts.
“We are afraid of Google. I must state this very clearly and frankly, because few of my colleagues dare do so publicly,” said Axel Spring CEO Mathias Doepfner in an open letter to Google.
But this situation is unlikely to repeat itself in Spain, regardless of what news organizations there feel about it. That’s because Spanish lawmakers have apparently made it illegal for publishers to waive their fees, even for those that do want to appear in Google News.
photo credit: Pranav Bhatt via photopin cc
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