Google shuts down news website in Spain
Following a strict levy on all excerpts from publishers' content, Google is making a radical cut in Spain. The Google News service is being shut down. This is likely also a warning in the dispute with German publishers.
Google is taking its news website offline in Spain in response to a legal fee imposed by publishers. As Google News does not contain any advertising and therefore does not generate any money for the company, the new fee is not sustainable, it said in a blog post late on Wednesday (local time).
The legal reform passed at the end of October stipulates that operators of news aggregators, which collect and process news from the web, must generally pay a fee to publishers and authors if they display excerpts from their texts. The so-called "Google fee" comes into force on January 1. The Internet company will close Google News in Spain on December 16 and will no longer collect content from Spanish media companies for other Spanish-language Google News sites, for example for the Latin American market.
A Google spokesperson told the news agency DPA that publishing content from Spain would continue to be displayed in Google's general search. The law in Spain explicitly refers to news aggregators such as Google News, not to general search engines such as Google.es.
Spain intends to stick to the controversial copyright reform despite Google's announcement. This was announced by the Ministry of Education and Culture on Thursday. The reform, which provides for the collection of a "Google levy", will be implemented as planned. The announced discontinuation of the Google News service in Spain is a business decision.
Similar conflict in Germany
In Germany, several media companies had tried in vain to persuade Google to negotiate licenses for the use of publishers' content on the basis of the ancillary copyright law. They initially agreed to free exploitation after Google announced that it would only display headlines in future. However, the dispute continues. In Germany, it is also about the display of text fragments and preview images. In this country, the company also does not display advertising in Google News.
The publishers emphasized that Google News is an important channel for them to bring Internet users to their websites. At the same time, their camp accused Google of abusing its dominant market position after the company announced the restriction to headlines. (SDA)
