Google News To Shut Down In Spain On December 16th

An anonymous reader writes The news aggregation services offered by Google is set to be no longer available for Spain, starting December 16th, 2014. The decision of Google comes as response to new Spanish legislation that gives publishers the right to claim compensation for republishing any part of their content. This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.

Comments

Things happen outside US!!!

[squiggleslash]

This follows news of services of startup Uber being forbidden in countries like Spain as well as Germany and some city councils worldwide like Delhi, or other services like AirBnb being put under pressure to cope with local laws in other jurisdictions.

Pretty much the only thing I can see that connects these three are that a US company operating abroad sometimes doesn't find a service that's legal in the US to be legal or practical in $RANDOM_COUNTY_THAT_ISNT_MERICA

As for the story, it's a shame, but that's how the Spanish media wants to operate, the Spanish government agrees with them, and so be it. It's not a big issue, or at least, if it ends up causing hardship, the political process will be followed again and changes will be made again.

Re:Things happen outside US!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't get too excited about your anti-americanism.

Germany has a long history of enacting protection of certain rackets, to fill the coffers of people that don't do anything. Artists that sold their work getting money everytime it resells (as opposed to bricklayers, carpenters, etc). It being illegal to rent out DVDs/BRs not specially licensed to that purpose. GEMA made youtube music videos too expensive.... I think even taxis have to pay to turn on the radio but that may be a scandinavian thing instead. Oh, and a tax on every computer monitor and TV and radio for shit programming, in exchange for $12B a year split. Not cheap at 18 euro ($22.50) a month.

It doesn't surprise me that the government bans uber to protect another leach in a long line of leaches that have their hands out for a hand out.

Re:They will either change their mind

[BarbaraHudson]

They won't change their minds - not until it's too late (which, for many of them, it already is). It's already been tried elsewhere, with negative results:

FTFA

in November, Germany's largest publisher, Axel Springer scrapped a bid to block Google after an experiment by a consortium of about 200 German publishers caused online traffic to plunge. Internet search experts say the shutdown of Google News in Spain may be greater on smaller, less-well known news publishers than on name-brand news sites who are less reliant on the site to draw in readers

Censorship

[javilon]

I am from Spain. The most interesting thing about this is that this stupid law was rushed throught the parlamentary process by surprise, with an ammendment added at the last minute. On the same period, three of the most important reporters that were critical to the government in the big spanish media were fired.

There is especulation that the two things are linked and this was a deal between the Spanish government and the owners of the big media conglomerates in Spain. The media got this law against Google in exchange for supporting the ailing government party which is 50% down in the polls as compared to the last general election, and panicking.

So the big media owners got what they wanted in exchange of censoring news critical to the government. What they do not realize is that this is going to hit their bottom lines because Google is not going to fold down. The are going to lose lots of money and media, and other newspapers from outside Spain are going to increase their share. At the end they will run to the government asking them to remove this law. Or they may even do it before the law is in place, when they see that Google is going to shut them down. The will deserve the humilliation. And this will tarnish their credibility because of the deal they did with the government. They are fools.

Re:Censorship

[javilon]

You are right,

And in a way, this can be seen as a reaction to the raise of a political party in Spain: Podemos. It translates into "we can" and it is made up of young people that are trying to rethink the whole democracy thing, turning it into a more direct democracy. It has gone from not existing to being the first in the polls in a period of two years. It has the old traditional parties panicking.

This seems to be the answer from the old elite. Censorship and personal attacks. And it is backfiring. With each of this actions, they show how corrupted and misguided they are, and podemos raises in the polls. People do not trust the traditional media (TV and papers) anymore and seeks information directly from other sources on the web.

I don't think podemos will end up governing the country. They are far left, at least they were at the beginning, although they are moderating their statements as they become wider. But this is causing lots of changes for good on Spanish politics, with the traditional parties not being able to turn their head anymore on corruption, corporate tax evasion or undehanded lobying.

Go ahead, try to sweep away the flood

[fnj]

Spain and certain other countries are wallowing relics of another age, unable to adapt to the new reality. The loss is theirs. How do they expect to keep their populations from discovering the power of VPNs, Tor, and the other facilities which can effortlessly sidestep their moronic restrictions?

Re:Google needs to share

[Half-pint HAL]

There's a potential difference. The problem is that Google News has become a one-stop-shop for many people (myself included). This means that we don't stay on the newspaper site, going back to Google News to look for the next interesting story. This means that advertising revenues on the content sites are minimal, and pretty much every news site on the entire internet is a loss-making enterprise. This is unsustainable.

Google's solution to claims of profiting off others' work was to run Google News without any advertising content, but that doesn't deal with the fact that Google News is a contributory factor to the financial woes of the content providers it relies on. If Google wants Google News to survive, it must exist in a viable ecosystem, and right now it doesn't. Even if you don't think this is Google's fault, the problem still exists and must be dealt with.