14 DAY TRIAL // Among the many problems Google has in Europe, probably the most baffling one is related to news publishers. Spain has recently passed the so-called “Google Tax” to bring in even more money for local publishers.
Basically, the law says that publishers can’t be involuntarily removed from Google News results, but the Internet giant also has to pay publishers for any snippets or links to their sites, Medium reports.
The fact that Google sends traffic to these publishers, pushing up their advertising revenues and page clicks, seems to matter zilch, and it seems that legislators don’t really care about it anyway. To make matters worse, publishers even see Google as being directly responsible for the decline of their advertising and circulation revenues.
The Spanish politicians seem to be looking to avoid a situation like the one that happened in Germany where a similar law was pushed, ordering Google to pay for the use of content. A loophole allowed the Internet giant to immediately push publishers out of the Google News universe, and they had to formally agree to be part of the News section and renounce compensation in the process.
Seeing just how fast traffic was dropping pushed them all to agree to Google’s terms. This, it seems, is exactly what the Spanish authorities want to avoid.
The law specifically declares that editors cannot refuse the use of “non-significant fragments of their articles” by third parties, but it makes it so that Google has to compensate them with more than thousands of referrals. Of course, the law doesn’t specifically mention Google, so it could encompass the likes of Facebook and other Internet companies too, as well as news aggregators. The company’s size and leading position, however, make it the obvious target.
“The introduction of the inalienable right was done to avoid what happened in Germany. If you are a digital editor that publishes with a copyleft license, like myself, and you minimally understand how the internet actually works, you cannot decide to not charge Google News. It is compulsory. More than a right it is an obligation. Therefore, Google cannot exclude sites requiring payment from Google News. It would still need to pay for those it includes, even if they do not want to be compensated,” said Julio Alonso, a Spanish Google digital entrepreneur.
Google could always shut down the Spanish branch of News and be done with it all rather than accept the “Google Tax.”