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Spanish Media Group Wants Gov't Help To Keep Google News In Spain
English-language site The Spain Report reports that Google's response to mandated payments for linking to and excerpting from Spanish news media sources — namely, shutting down Google News in Spain — doesn't sit well with Spanish Newspaper Publishers' Association, which
issued a statement [Thursday] night saying that Google News was "not just the closure of another service given its dominant market position," recognising that Google's decision "will undoubtedly have a negative impact on citizens and Spanish businesses. Given the dominant position of Google (which in Spain controls almost all of the searches in the market and is an authentic gateway to the Internet), AEDE requires the intervention of Spanish and community authorities, and competition authorities, to effectively protect the rights of citizens and companies."
Irene Lanzaco, a spokeswoman for AEDE, told The Spain Report by telephone that "we're not asking Google to take a step backwards, we've always been open to negotiations with Google" but, she said: "Google has not taken a neutral stance. Of course they are free to close their business, but one thing is the closure of Google News and quite another the positioning in the general index."
Asked if the newspaper publishers' association had received any complaints from its members since Wednesday's announcement by Google, Mrs. Lanzaco refused to specify, but said: "Spanish publishers talk to AEDE constantly."
Google needs to play this card more often.
Yes, I'm glad to see someone is finally growing a pair and standing up to this nonsense.
Funny how, just like in Germany, the newspaper publishers scream that Google is killing them, but when Google leaves they complain that Google's leaving is killing them.
They're looking to blame anyone except themselves. Google is the target du jour.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The publishers didn't attempt to negotiate. They were passing laws / regulations. Negotiations happen between parties on a relatively equal footing.
That being said. This is negotiating. The Spanish publishers said you can't link to our content without paying. Google said no. The publishers passed a law to enforce their position. So now they showed their big stick. Google decides not to link at all which will drive Spanish internet news traffic outside of Spain. That's Google's big stick. This is what negotiating looks like when threats are involved.
"Most European cultures including Spain do not have such a culture. Instead, they would likely prefer to negotiate with google on the issue."
You just don't understand the issue here.
This legislation is so utterly stupid (I'm Spanish), so utterly against everybody but AEDE members (you see, they don't even represent the press but only the six biggest press companies), that everybody except AEDE and their government mates where *prying* for Google to stand its current position as the only hope for the law to be dismissed.
Coming from Canada, I'll give you an example of the problem with Google News. PS I'm not french.
1) Clicking the news tab will always default to the US news. Even if Google is forcing the google.ca domain
Badly designed browsers when doing private browsing don't allow for ephemeral cookies.
The problem is that you are geolocated by IP (and yes, it gets this wrong if you are using a VPN into a node in another country - it thinks you are in the other country; not solving this "problem" is intentional on the part of the IETF), and a attempted cookie is set saying "They are in Canada; redirect and use the google.ca domain to serve up the first page". So google.ca shows up.
This geolocation is not repeated, and the cookie is not reset subsequently, since it's a relatively computationally expensive reverse lookup operation; if the cookie is there, it's referenced, and if the cookie is not there, it's not referenced. Then your subsequent request comes in through that first page, the cookie is examined, is not seen, and therefore you get the default, which is the US response.
The proper thing for your browser to do is to set an ephemeral cookie when doing "private browsing"; that is, it allows the "set" of the cookie, but since it's "private browsing", the cookie is set in memory in the DOM, instead of being saved in permanent cookie storage.
So it's happening that way because your browser implemented has screwed the pooch on what it mean when you are private browsing, and just blocks all cookie sets unconditionally. In other words, your browser sucks.
NB: Chrome gets this wrong in "incognito mode", as well, in the other direction; it implements ephemeral cookies into the session, rather than the DOM. Presumably, this is because they want cookies for login sessions to persist across DOMs which involve Google properties. So it's possible for an "incognito mode" session to leak information to outside parties for cross-site purposes. You'll see this with "limited number of views per month" sites, like the NYT and other news sites, where if you use the same "incognito mode" session - which persists, even if you close the window and open a new "incognito mode" window. If you restart Chrome, then the cookies are flushed. It's not clear whether this is intentional or just bad programming.