Spain recently passed a law that made Google shut down its News service within the Spanish territory. Reports claim that the new law will force the internet company to pay for its article search results.
The Spanish Newspaper Publishers' Association (AEDE) is making a petition asking the Spanish government to reconsider putting Google News back online. AEDE insisted that Google is just too big to simply leave and the obligatory takedown can bring in a lot of negative repercussion on both public and business sector. Negotiations are currently undergoing between government officials and Google executives in order to convince Google to bring the news website back online.
The closure of Google News in Spain could have diverse negative effect on smaller news publisher relying on the search engines popularity. Google along with other websites like Yahoo! is responsible for bringing around 8% - 21% to Spain's top five news websites - ABC.es, ElPais.com, ElPeriodico.com, LaVanguardia.com and Elmundo.es.
Asociacion de Internautas, an internet collective composed of Spanish web users said "The big losers will be media firms themselves, which, with the disappearance of their news from the search engine, will lose traffic to their pages."
The same issue transpired in Germany. In October, a massive legal battle between German publishers has provoked Google to stop posting search results taken from various German news website. After the decision, German's largest publish Axel Springer closed down due to exponential decrease in traffic.
The law which is a response to various European political group campaigns to regulate Google's power over the online search market has raised a lot of eyebrows especially on the aspects of the "right to self-expression".
Spanish publisher which rely mostly on Google search result to attract traffic to their website is now pleading the Spanish parliament to reconsider the lifting the law in order to persuade Google in putting their site back online.
