This article was published on October 31, 2014

Spain orders Google to pay news publishers a tax for search results


Spain orders Google to pay news publishers a tax for search results

The Spanish parliament passed a ruling yesterday to allow news publishers to charge aggregators and search engines like Google each time they display news content in search results.

The law, lobbied for by Spain’s AEDE group of news outlets, goes into effect on January 1, 2015, but it doesn’t yet specify how much aggregators and search engines could be charged. Google’s Spanish division responded saying it was disappointed with the decision, and will work to help news publishers in the country increase income.

This is similar to a row in Germany earlier this October, between Google and a group of German publications who claimed that Google’s inclusion of news content in search results was tantamount to republishing content and caused them loss of revenues. Google Germany responded by removing summaries and image thumbnails from these results, displaying only headline links instead.

It’s yet to be seen what action aggregators take in Spain to deal with the new ruling, but with just two months to go before the law comes into effect, we can expect to hear of developments very soon.

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Spain OKs ‘Google Tax’ Demanded by News Publishers [The New York Times]

 

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