Google News to Shut Down in Spain
By Mark Scott

LONDON — Google News is saying goodbye to Spain.

The website, which compiles headlines and summaries of news articles from various sources, will go dark in Spain on Dec. 16. Google plans to shut the site there in protest of a new law that would force the company and other news aggregators to pay Spanish publishers for the use of their content.

The rules, which come into force in January, do not specify how much Google and others like Yahoo News would have to pay per article. But they carry a potential one-time $750,000 fine if companies do not comply with the law.

The legislation follows similar rules in other countries, including France and Germany, that allow publishers to charge when parts of their articles are included in Google’s news aggregation. In those countries, the company has tended to come to terms with the publishers, rather than withdraw from the field. But the Spanish rule will not allow local publishers to forgo such payments.

And in the case of Spain, it is not clear what parties, if any, will benefit from the new rules.

While the law is aimed at providing much-needed revenue to Spanish publishers, which are struggling to generate income from their online offerings, the loss of Google News and the traffic that it sends to local newspapers may end up hurting publishers that often rely on the company’s service to direct people to their websites. In Germany, some publishers have opted to waive their right to demand fees, rather than lose the traffic Google sends their way.

But Google’s dominance of Europe’s online world — its search business holds a market share of about 85 percent, bigger than in the United States — has European officials trying to rein it in.

The European antitrust authorities in Brussels asked on Thursday for more information from online mapping and travel companies as part of the European Commission’s long-running investigation into Google’s business practices. And the search engine has been struggling to cope with a European privacy ruling this year that allows people to ask that some links about themselves be removed from global search results.

Google, which reported revenue of $16.5 billion in the third quarter, said on Thursday that the Spanish law, which has been nicknamed the Google Tax, would make it too costly for the company to continue operating its local news site, although Spanish publishers’ content would still be available in its regular search results.

‘‘It’s with real sadness that we’ll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain,’’ Richard Gingras, the head of Google News, said in a blog post, adding that the search engine’s news product directed millions of readers to publishers’ websites. ‘‘As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site), this new approach is simply not sustainable.’’

In response, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, which helped draft the new rules, said in a statement that Google’s choosing to close its local news aggregator was a ‘‘business decision’’ separate from the country’s legal process, and that news and other information would still be freely available on the Internet.

As part of Google’s decision to shut Google News in Spain, which is the first time the company has taken down its aggregator service for legal reasons, it will also remove all Spanish publishers, including El País, from its global news aggregating products.

In total, Google News in Spain receives about 3.5 million visitors a month, making it the 226th most-visited site in the country, according to SimilarWeb, a digital measurement company. That compares with more than 250 million monthly visitors in the United States, where Google News is the 30th most-visited website.

Although the Spanish law is aimed solely at online news aggregators, changes in how people use technology may soon make the rules redundant.

That is because individuals, many of whom rely on smartphones to surf the web, are increasingly finding news content through online searches and social media posts, not aggregation sites.

The Spanish newspaper El Mundo, for example, receives just 1.3 percent of its monthly traffic from Google News, compared with 34 percent from search engine queries, according to SimilarWeb. In contrast, the news agency Reuters still relies on news aggregators for about 44 percent of its Internet traffic in the United States.

For some publishers, however, Google News still plays an important role in how people consume digital content.

After Germany passed rules that permitted publishers to charge aggregating sites when their articles appeared online, Google removed many German organizations from its news product, which led to a drastic fall in online traffic to some newspapers’ sites.

Axel Springer, which has talked openly about Google’s dominance, experienced a 40 percent decline in traffic coming from Google’s search results and an 80 percent drop in traffic from Google News, according to Mathias Döpfner, Axel Springer’s chief executive.

Mr. Döpfner said that Axel Springer would have ‘‘shot ourselves out of the market’’ if the company had continued demanding that news aggregating sites pay a licensing fee for its content.

Google has faced similar challenges with French and Belgian publishers, but eventually reached an agreement with local newspapers, which includes the creation of $74 million fund to help French publishers with their digital operations.

Google反擊 關西班牙新聞網頁

網路搜尋引擎巨擘Google十一日宣布，最快十六日關閉西班牙Google新聞網頁。明年元旦生效的新版西班牙智慧財產權法規定，媒體有權對Google、雅虎等顯示其新聞內容的搜尋引擎收取最高六十萬歐元（約台幣兩千三百六十二萬元）的費用。

西班牙新智財法「賦予新聞產製者和發布者因內容獲使用而收費的權利」，以保護印刷媒體產業；西班牙報紙編輯協會最高可向搜尋引擎業者收取六十萬歐元「Google稅」。

Google除關閉西班牙Google新聞網頁外，也會移除其他地區的西班牙新聞內容連結，包括西班牙媒體欲拓展業務範圍的拉美地區。

Google資深新聞暨社交產品總監金格拉斯對此表示遺憾，並稱「Google未（登廣告）從新聞服務中獲利，新法將讓Google無以為繼」。報業百年來受限紙本發行範圍，但Google新聞在全球有七十幾個版本，囊括卅五種語言。西班牙律師多黎諾說，媒體此舉可能「將自己逐出市場，指日可待」。

德國去年修改著作權法，要求Google支付版稅。Google關閉德國新聞網頁後，德國媒體官網流量暴跌八成；德國媒體今年十月同意讓Google引述新聞摘要。類似爭議也出現在法國，Google去年同意幫助法國媒體增加網路廣告營收，並出資協助數位新聞發展，以解決連結各媒體新聞付費的爭議。

原文參照：
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/12/11/google-to-drop-its-news-site-in-spain/

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/business/20141212/c12google/zh-hant/

2014-12-12．聯合報．A24．國際．編譯陳韻涵