MADRID, December 16 (Sputnik) — The Spanish Government may still introduce changes to the so-called Google Tax that obliges Internet news services to pay royalties to Spanish publishers, should the situation require doing so, the country’s Minister of Industry, Economy and Tourism said Tuesday.
“Not a single decision should be irreversible. It will be possible to introduce additional changes into the law after the situation is studied,” Jose Manuel Soria said as quoted by the Europa Press agency.
The minister added that it is not until January 1 when the new law takes effect.
“The publishers themselves suggested the government to tax for providing direct links to their pages. Now the [publishing] industry will need to evaluate the real impact of loosing this tool of Google. No decisions should be made before completing such an evaluation,” the minister added.
On Tuesday, Google closed its news service Google News in Spain amid the new intellectual property law nicknamed the Google Tax. The measure that will take effect on January 1, 2015 obliges the news aggregators to pay for publishing news from Spanish media sources.
