14 DAY TRIAL // Understanding the way the Internet works is not exactly the most difficult thing in the world and neither is how a search engine does its job. It seems, however, that lawmakers are dead set in making mistake after mistake just for the sake of appeasing various interest groups.
Spain, for instance, has not learnt anything from Germany’s failed attempts to get Google to pay taxes to local publishers.
The Spanish parliament passed a ruling late last week, allowing news publishers to charge aggregators and search engines each time they display news content in search results. The law is scheduled to go into effect at the start of 2015, although there are no details on how the law is going to work exactly and how much these publishers can charge. One thing’s for sure, though, Google won’t be bending to the new law, since it will set a precedent the company doesn’t want out there.
Germany’s publishers tried to pull a similar stunt, forcing Google to pay up for any snippet of their news articles that got displayed in the search results pages. What Google did was to pull out all such snippets and leave out just the links.
The immediate effect was a drop in traffic for the newspapers. That’s because the snippets Google and all other search engines display next to articles are tightly connected with the benefit users get from them. If someone gets a clue about what they’re about to read, they’re more likely to click on the link and continue reading. Without the description text in there, people are less likely to trust the source and to click through to it.
The snippets are, in the end, something that Google puts there to help users decide on clicking on a link or another, and therefore, to actually help out the very same publishers that are now trying to tax Google for using copyrighted content.
The German saga
In Germany, publishers were equally arrogant and thought that Google had the most to win off using those text portions. Immediately after the law went into effect, Google automatically stopped displaying the controversial text from all German publishers and offered them the chance to opt in to have their content indexed and displayed as before, for free.
It wasn’t long before publishers returned with their Tails between their legs and signed up for Google’s service after traffic dropped; an expected effect. They may have complained about Google’s tactics, and accused the company of using its market power to pressure them, but in the end they found it in their best interest to be a part of the ecosystem.
While it’s too early to say if the situation will follow the same path in Spain, chances are quite high that this will be the exact same scenario.