Google News to Exit Spanish Market Ahead of New Copyright Law: Company

MOSCOW, December 11 (Sputnik) – Google is shutting Google News in Spain and removing Spanish publishers from the service on December 16, before Spain's new intellectual property law comes into effect in January, Richard Gingras, the head of Google News said.

"So it's with real sadness that on 16 December we'll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain," Gingras said in a post on the Google Europe Blog.

The new law, dubbed the "Google tax," was passed by the Spanish government in October. It allows news publishers to charge aggregators such as Google a fee for displaying their content in search results. Going into effect on January 1, 2015, the law does not specify how much the aggregators could be charged.

Gingras explained that the new approach is not sustainable as the service itself makes no money. "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," he stated.

The "Google tax" in Spain follows similar attempt in Germany to extract licensing revenues from the Internet giant. Google responded with a requirement that publishers give it consent for having snippets of their work indexed by the news service. France also passed a similar law, with Google arriving at a consensus with news publishers in the country in January 2013, by paying 60 million euros ($75 million) into a fund to help French media establish an Internet presence. The company also settled a similar case with Belgian publishers in December 2012 by helping them boost revenues online.