Google News is finally available again in Spain
Google’s news aggregation service, Google News, is returning to Spain after an eight-year absence prompted by the stupid position of the previous government in 2014, combined with the narrow-minded demands of the country’s traditional media. This is is essentially good news, because Spain being one of the only democracies without Google News was, to say the least, a strange situation.
What happened in 2014? A government obsessed with cozying up to the traditional media and with out-of-date ideas about intellectual property decided to push for a tax, giving print media the “inalienable right” to charge for the use of their news.
The decision can be summarized as, “traditional newspapers are a bunch of dullards who keep losing money because they don’t understand the Internet, but Google is doing well, so let’s take some cash from it and give it to the media, who will pay us back with good coverage.” This forced Google News to pay for providing links to Spanish news sites, which created two problems: shelling out for a product without advertising that did not generate any income; and it overturned the long-standing practice on the internet of sites not charging for links that generated traffic for them. If Google agreed, the risk was that, subsequently, the greedy publishers of traditional media would demand payment from anybody providing a…
