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Last night, Google announced that in response to the new Spanish law, Google will have to shut down Google News within Spain.
Spain's new law forces Google to pay a fee for showing snippets of news results in Google News. Google says, the Google News engine actually drives tons of free traffic and thus revenue to these publishers. And since Google News has no ads on it, Google News cannot afford to operate in Spain.
So they are delisting all Google News publishers from Google News and turning off Google News from operating in Spain on December 16th.
It is only a company like Google who can do that and stick it to the man.
Meanwhile, the big losers are the people and publishers within Spain. The ones imposing this new law are government officials. The news publishers need the traffic and revenue. I seriously wonder how long this will last, how long the publishers can survive without Google News.
I spoke in Spain a few times over one trip and the webmaster world is not dumb. They all hate the government there and it is just a shame.
Matt Cutts wrote on Twitter:
@ramez It's pretty crazy to me that publishers aren't allowed to waive their right on this.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) December 11, 2014Indeed.
Forum discussion at Google+, WebmasterWorld and Hacker News.
