A sorry tale: Google News closes its Spain service

Google has announced that it is closing its Google News service in Spain, prompting extremely negative coverage around the world from media as diverse as TechCrunch, The Guardian or SearchEngineLand that raises questions about Spain’s press freedom.

Today’s sad news is very much a chronicle of a death foretold: on September 17, along with several other people, I met with Richard Gingras, the Senior Director of News and Social Products at Google, who told us that faced with a situation where it would have to pay for providing links to news stories, the company would have little option but to close the service in that country.

Google could not consider paying for providing links: this would go against one of the principles of the internet: links are a fundamental part of the architecture of the web, not that this was going to stop the Spanish Association of Newspaper Publishers (AEDE) and the Spanish vice-president from teaming up to bring the country’s main dailies into line.

Google News is available in more than 70 countries around the world and in 35 languages. But from December 15, two weeks before Spain’s new law on intellectual property right comes into force, the Spanish edition of Google News will disappear, leaving behind a shameful statement explaining the company’s decision, and Spain’s media will…