Google versus the European media

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study-spains-google-tax-news-shows-how-much-damage-it-has-done.shtml

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110718/16394915157/belgian-newspapers-give-permission-to-google-to-return-them-to-search-results.shtml

From the July 2015 story:

As you may recall, governments across Europe, generally at the behest of traditional newspaper publishers, have been pushing for what they call an "ancillary copyright," but which is much better referred to as a "snippet tax" or a "link tax." Or, if people are being honest: a Google News tax.

The idea is that any aggregator site that is linking out to other sources with little snippets telling people what's at the link, has to pay the original publication to link to them.

If you think this goes against the entire concept of the internet, you're not wrong. Belgium was the first country to try it, and Google responded by removing complaining publications from Google News.

In response, the publications then complained that Google News was being mean to them, even though they were the ones complaining.

In Germany, a similar thing happened, whereby Google left the complaining publications in Google News, but without snippets since that was a key aspect of the law.

Again, the publishers screamed "unfair" even though they were the ones who had pushed for the law in the first place.

When it came time for Spain to try to appease its misguided and angry publishers, the government sought to avoid the tactics that Google had done in the past and thus made it mandatory to pay, saying that sites themselves couldn't even opt-out of getting payments, even if they didn't want them.

In response to this, Google broke out the somewhat surprising "nuclear option" and shut down Google News in Spain entirely.

It seemed quite obvious that this move would create huge problems for media properties that wanted to be open and wanted people to link to them.

After the law went into effect, the Spanish Association of Publishers of Periodical Publications (AEEPP) commissioned an economic study about the impact of the new Spanish ancillary copyright law -- and found (not surprisingly) that the legal change (and the shuttering of Google News and other aggregators) was absolutely harmful to the Spanish news media and innovation in general.

It also found strong evidence that, contrary to what those fighting against Google News have claimed, aggregators expand the market for the original sources, rather than shrink it by acting as a substitute.

The data, not surprisingly, shows that the impact on smaller news publishers has been the worst -- again consistent with the idea that all this law really does is lock out competition for the larger players.

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