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."

Comments

More power to Google

[fustakrakich]

The newspapers are the greedy ones. They want to be listed prominently for free and then charge for the content of the list! Hey, if they close the deal, great. Business is business.

They brought it upon themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would Google continue the service to lose money for a function they gain none through...

Re:They brought it upon themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny thing about extortion. If the person you're trying to extort can just walk away without paying the extortion, they always do.

Re:They brought it upon themselves

[turbidostato]

"All we have to do is figure out who is trying to extort whom."

AEDE, no doubt.

Their point is that they forcibly want a levvy for the "privilege" of indexing their headlines because "they are providing profit to the indexers". They obviously "forget" about the more or less 30% of traffic that comes to them straigth from google news.

Google can't just stop indexing AEDE members in order to avoid the tax because the levvy is for everyone in that activity no matter what, so they decided that since they don't want to pay, they'll close their doors in Spain.

And then, all of a sudden, AEDE members "remember" about that 30% of traffic that Google news is providing them and claim kindof "monopoly" on the part of Google so the government somehow should force Google to stay open and pay the levvy nevertheless.

AEDE (news), CEDRO (books), EGEDA (films) and SGAE (music) are just the Spanish versions of your RIAA, just so you know what kind of people are we talking about.

HAHA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

That being said, are people too stupid/too lazy to just go to the newspapers' websites and browse the articles?

(probably...)

Imagine that!

[Frosty Piss]

Well imagine that, they want it all - free traffic from from Google that google has to pay for... Well, it comes full circle now.

"Rights holders" still do not understand the equation.

Google needs to play this card more often.

Re:Imagine that!

[jbolden]

Generally when governments legislate in good faith they bring major stakeholders in. The Spanish government shouldn't be regulating search without having Google at the table unless your goal is to move Spain away from Google.

That being said I think walking like this is the right thing to do. Spain (and Europe in general) needs to start working with USA companies whom their people use for services but who do not want to be part of the European regulatory regime. They need to decide, what their policy on how international they want the internet to be. Right now they want the entire continuum:
a) their people to have full easy access to the global internet everything
b) The internet their people has access to run under European law

They need to pick a point on the continuum understanding that (a) and (b) are opposites.

Re:Imagine that!

[Luckyo]

Publishers do not have legislative powers. Democratically elected leaders do.

Democracy means (at least in theory) that demos, the people get to decide what is best for their country. And right now, a lot of people across Europe are not fond of Google's obvious disregard of them as unimportant enough to not even be negotiated with.

In general, most European nations have a tradition that these things are negotiated on. US/UK tradition is in direct conflict with this, and is more of posturing and ultimatums.

Re:Imagine that!

[SydShamino]

By leaving, they are happily giving up their position as leading Spanish news aggregator. That seems to avoid the monopoly issue entirely, as now there's space for other competitors to grow.

Re:Imagine that!

[DrJimbo]

But instead of negotiating or even trying to compromise they [Google] just took their ball and left.

WTF? What was there to negotiate or compromise on? Paying the extortionists any non-zero amount would have been the worst business decision ever made by Google. While there were extreme options available to Google, such as law suits and massive lobbying, Google took a rather mild approach by obeying the silly law while refusing to pay the extortion which meant they simply shut down their services that would have been encumbered by the extortion racket.

Even if the complete lunacy of the extortion racket was not clear to you previously, this idiotic press release should have made it crystal clear. The Spanish news media need Google more than Google needs them. Therefore it was idiotic for the Spanish news media to try to get Google to pay them for providing them with a service they greatly desire.

When you are freely providing someone a service they greatly desire and then they want to charge *you* for providing them with this service, there is very little room for compromise or negotiation. For example, if I owned a country and passed a law that Slashdot has to pay me for every comment I post, their only logical response would be to stop allowing me to post comments. I could bitch and moan about them being big babies about it but until my position has some relationship to reality, there is really nothing to negotiate or compromise on.

Re:Imagine that!

[Notabadguy]

If you were to RTFA linked in the summary, you would find two things:

1. The Spanish Newpaper Lobbyist Group (AEDE) is behind the legislation.
2. Corruption in Spain is rampant, in every aspect of life.

Re:Imagine that!

[turbidostato]

"Publishers do not have legislative powers. Democratically elected leaders do."

Have you thought a bit about what the "intellectual propiety business" involves, moreso when talking about levvies?

It basically gets down to the collecting agency sitting down waiting for the buckets full of money to arrive.

This means two things:
1) They have quite a lot of money.
2) They don't need to work a hard day for the money to arrive so they have time to do other things instead... like lobbying the government making use of the lot of money they gather (see one).

And then, let's talk about the subset of IP business we are talking here: press. They not only have the money and the inclination to lobby the government, they also control the tool politics are most afraid of: press. Now put together these three things and see that, yes, publishers have indeed factual legislative powers.

Re:Imagine that!

[jbolden]

Dude it isn't moronic. The market segmentation has a lot to do with the profits on handset sales, the profits on cellular contracts, the profits from software, the profits on advertising. The top 11% of customers are worth more than the remaining 89% by a lot. Heck the top 3% may be worth more than the bottom 97%.

You can desegment the "transportation facilitation devices" and list shoes, bicycles, cars and airplanes in one big pile. But that doesn't change the fact a single airplane sale is worth many many sales of shoes.

A step too far?

[Firethorn]

One has to love the unforeseen consequences. By the way, this is the first time I saw that the Spanish legislation went further than the German ones - The German court decision merely gave the right to charge, but per the article the Spanish one mandated charging.

I can't help but picture that AEDE is going 'NOT AS PLANNED NOT AS PLANNED!!!'. Though how they could expect Google's actions to be any different in this case than it was in Germany, I don't know.

Spend many millions in lobbying efforts to force Google to pay for doing X, only to have Google go 'Fine, we won't do X', costing them potentially millions more in advertising.

Now, one should remember that consumer protection and business regulation is much stronger over in Europe, but deciding that a business has to continue to run at a loss is pushing it. It's more likely that they'll get a emergency overruling of the 'must pay' system.

Because let's face it: NOBODY is going to want to run a news aggregator where they have to pay to list the news. It's more likely that the news sites would have to pay to be listed.

Price of leveraging fiat government powers

[Karmashock]

You didn't ask google or negotiate with google. Your government said they'd use their state agencies to cease google assets or go through international diplomatic channels to cease google assets unless google started paying you money.

Google responded by taking that power away from you by shutting down all excuses you would have to use such powers.

Quid pro quo.

This for that.

Action = Reaction.

What needs to be walked back is the Spanish law or attempt to make google pay. If you want google to do some sort of ad revenue sharing or whatever... then have that discussion. But ultimately, if they don't want to pay you... then at the end of the day you're either going to have to accept that google considers the money they get from ad traffic to be all theirs... period... or that you're going to have make a viable internet business without google's help.

Choose.

I, like many here, am very supportive of what google has done here not so much because it sticks it to spanish newspapers which I have no opinion on. But rather because it should scare arrogant government ministers into accepting that they actually aren't all powerful.

Similar things happened in Hungry when they tried to take bandwidth. We have these aging institutions that are being bypassed by the internet and they don't like it. Rather then adapt they're just trying to legislate the internet into paying them.

Fuck them. Either join the 21st century or subsist on existing revenue streams.

The media business is very hard these days. Nothing unusual about that. Many US media organizations are going bankrupt. But if you look back in time, you'll see that that isn't that unusual. The media business has always been a tough one. Typically it is dominated by deep pockets that dominate the industry with ruthless powerplays.

We'll see where it goes.