Spain vs. Google News: greed, incompetence, and an all round lack of principles
As of today, 16 December, 2014, Google has closed down its Google News service in Spain, the only country in which it has done so. The impact on traffic to the websites of Spanish media will be felt immediately. Quite simply, and contrary to what the Spanish government and the Spanish Association of Newspaper Publishers (AEDE) say about the company refusing to negotiate, Google had no choice. What was there to negotiate when the government had already passed a law requiring it to pay the media to whose stories Google News provides links?
The company was able to negotiate in other countries because their governments were not trying to get it to pay for providing links. And this is the nub of the issue, although the dinosaurs who run the AEDE seemed to have missed the point that there are other ways to make Google pay. In France, after the president himself intervened, Google was persuaded to set up a fund to help the country’s newspapers adapt to the internet age. Would such an approach have worked in Spain? It’s hard to know: my impression is that it wouldn’t, because Google would have avoided setting a precedent that would have prompted many other countries to do the same, but at least it would have illustrated the ignorance and irresponsibility of the AEDE and the Spanish government.
Spain’s image abroad at the moment is that of a country that doesn’t understand the internet, is against progress, and that is led by a cadre from the previous century thanks to its role in the “right to be forgotten” farrago, along with the AEDE’s tax on links providers, and the exit tax, which punishes start ups.
I have chosen the words greed and incompetence in my title very carefully. From the privileged perspective of an observer and somebody who speaks to a wide range of people, I have watched this story unfold over the last several years. I remember the AEDE’s efforts to get Google “to pay”. The organization turned up for a meeting with the company bearing a pro forma invoice that Google quite logically ignored. I then attended an event organized by the AEDE in Burgos at which I was encouraged to “provoke” the audience: one of the worst experiences in my 25 years of giving talks. I have also talked at length with representatives from Google, Menéame and other news aggregators about the topic. So, in short, my comments are nothing if not measured.
So, what has happened here? The greed and lack of principles I refer to is the government’s efforts to control the media and the media’s desire to get money out of Google. It was greed that led the members of a press association that represents a few newspapers still living in the past to align their content with the wishes of the government: all anybody needs to do is to look at the editorial line taken by three of Spain’s leading newspapers — El País, El Mundo, and La Vanguardia — before and after they changed their editors earlier this year. In essence, the government agreed to pin Google down, and in return, it was given the heads of the three former editors on a plate, along with a more receptive attitude.
The Spanish government’s strategy, engineered by the all-powerful deputy prime minister Soraya Saénz de Santamaría, was, initially, the same as the German government’s, but after Berlin backed down, at the request of the German media, Madrid decided to include in its new media law the “inviolable right” of the big newspapers to payment for links to their content. This left Google with nothing to negotiate over. The law is the law. So Google decided to pull out of Spain.
This ridiculous law has also created considerable collateral damage: smaller organizations such as Menéame, which sent a lot of traffic the Spanish media’s way each day. So far, the social media, Twitter and Facebook principally, and which are filled with links to Spanish news sites, have said nothing about the move, hoping that the government will keep its unspoken promise not to touch them: all in all very confusing, but hardly surprising, given that this is essentially a laboratory law, passed without any sense of responsibility, and that will cause much more damage than it repairs. The Spanish media’s crisis is not going to be solved by charging Google, but instead by getting rid of the dinosaurs who run it, which isn’t about to happen any time soon.
This is a sad day for the Spanish media and for the country’s reputation internationally. It is the story of a bunch of incompetents colluding for their own interests, and devoid of any of the most basic principles of journalism or even common sense; of a law rushed through Congress, without proper oversight or supervision, and hidden from Brussels. In any other country this would be seen for what it is: fraud. And what’s more, the new law has failed: Google has gone. So now all we have left is a law that nobody will bother even to apply: trying to get money out of the myriad tiny companies or individual journalists out there would create more problems than it’s worth for an already highly unpopular government and newspaper industry, and that will doubtless be overturned by the European Court of Justice at the earliest opportunity.
The whole affair brings to mind Albert Einstein’s comments about prohibition: “Nothing is more destructive of respect for the government and the law of the land than passing laws which cannot be enforced.”
(En español, aquí)
