Spain's Publishing Industry Commits Internet Suicide as Google Quits News

Politics / Internet Dec 16, 2014 - 06:33 AM GMT

Spain at the heart of a luddite Europe Union has forced Google to quit its news service following its law makers succumbing to Spain's lunatic publishing industry that was expecting profit from taxing Google for every news story that it linked to on Google News as of 1st of Jan 2015. That's just for posting the title of news stories with a short snippet to prompt google news searchers to link through to the source content, a lot of free traffic that Spain's publishing industry had greatly profited from.

Google's response has been to pull the plug on Google News Spain and all of the FREE traffic that it tended to generate for Spain's publishing industry, many of whom barely a few hours after the search services shutdown are starting to realise the magnitude of their greedy error and are already calling on the Spanish government to do something to force Google to reinstate its Spanish news search service.

Earlier Richard Gingras, Head of Google News had stated:

Google News is a service that hundreds of millions of users love and trust, including many here in Spain. It’s free to use and includes everything from the world’s biggest newspapers to small, local publications and bloggers. Publishers can choose whether or not they want their articles to appear in Google News -- and the vast majority choose to be included for very good reason. Google News creates real value for these publications by driving people to their websites, which in turn helps generate advertising revenues.

But sadly, as a result of a new Spanish law, we’ll shortly have to close Google News in Spain. Let me explain why. 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.

For centuries publishers were limited in how widely they could distribute the printed page. The Internet changed all that -- creating tremendous opportunities but also real challenges for publishers as competition both for readers’ attention and for advertising Euros increased. We’re committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues.

As things stand Spain no longer exists in the Google news universe and Spanish news publishers articles are being ranked much lower in the main google search index, which probably means they will be deleted from the main index as well as Spain is destined to become the North Korea of the internet a black void on the map of google global internet search traffic.

However, Spain is not an isolated incident as many members of the European Super State are hell bent on also destroying their publishing industries through similar baldrick-esk cunning plans.

Nadeem Walayat

http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

Nadeem Walayat has over 25 years experience of trading derivatives, portfolio management and analysing the financial markets, including one of few who both anticipated and Beat the 1987 Crash. Nadeem's forward looking analysis focuses on UK inflation, economy, interest rates and housing market. He is the author of five ebook's in the The Inflation Mega-Trend and Stocks Stealth Bull Market series.that can be downloaded for Free.

Nadeem is the Editor of The Market Oracle, a FREE Daily Financial Markets Analysis & Forecasting online publication that presents in-depth analysis from over 600 experienced analysts on a range of views of the probable direction of the financial markets, thus enabling our readers to arrive at an informed opinion on future market direction. http://www.marketoracle.co.uk

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