Google is closing its News services in Spain next week in response to the new intellectual law that is going to be imposed from 1 January 2015. The law states that the tech giant must pay a fee for using local publishers’ content.
Dubbed as ‘Google tax’, it requires aggregator services that post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies, an organisation that represents the Spanish newspaper industry. Failure to do so could result in fines up to €600,000 ($750,000).
Google News head Richard Gingras has in a blog post announced about the service closing down. He states, “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.”
Germany recently argued with Google where the publishers should be getting a compensation for using excerpts from their stories in the service. But after a year the publishers understood how Google News was valuable to their business and revoked its demand of compensation.
The service is just four years old and is available in more than 70 global editions and 35 different languages. Spain has gone ahead with the law and with Google removing Spanish publishers from the other international News sites as well, the web will be deprived of Spanish news world over.