Google has announced it will be shutting down its news linking service in Spain in response to legislation that will compel Google to pay for aggregating news excerpts or articles, says a TechCrunch report.
Richard Gingras, head of Google News, said in a statement: "As a result of a new Spanish law, we'll shortly have to close Google News in Spain. This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not."
"As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it's with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into effect in January) we'll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain."
Jon Russell of TechCrunch says these events are "not unlike the situation in Germany," where publishers have also complained about the lack of compensation from Google for using headlines and snippets of their news articles.
However, German publishers have also admitted that Google's news service is too valuable for marketing purposes, and consequently revised an internet copyright bill to grant an exception to Google News.
David Post of The Washington Post writes that Spain's new legislation to make Google pay for using news snippets of the country's publishers seems to be "part of a larger "anti-linking" trend taking hold in Europe - of a piece with the EU's very troubling new "Right to be Forgotten," which gives individuals the right to have the links to information about themselves deleted from search engine listings in certain circumstances."
"I'm not sure how much of this is anti-Google (and anti- the many other US-based companies that have managed to become very large and very powerful because of their mastery of the online environment) and how much is just anti-Internet - but it's a very unfortunate development," he adds.
As a result of this move, Spanish publishers will be excluded from the cluster of news articles that show up in normal Google Search results, according to WSJ.
A.J. Ghergich of Ghergich & Co., a search engine marketing agency, says, "Not being in that news cluster on Google Search is going to kill them."
Since people mostly search for news on Google's main search engine rather than specifically opening Google News, being excluded from the search results "will actually hurt them [the publishers] the most," adds Ghergich.