Google News Is Returning to Spain After Seven Year Fall-Out
Google News Is Returning to Spain After Seven Year Fall-Out
(Bloomberg) -- Google News is making a come-back in Spain, almost seven years after it pulled the service following a spat over paying for article links.
“We made this decision as a result of a new royal decree implementing the European Copyright Directive, introduced today by the Spanish government”, Fuencisla Clemares, the head of Google Iberia, announced in a company blog post Wednesday.
The EU copyright law is allowing publishers to ask for payment whenever online platforms use their content. The new rules have allowed news outlets to negotiate with web platforms such as Alphabet Inc. owned Google and Facebook Inc. over the reproduction of their content.
In France, Google was fined 500 million euros ($593 million) after the search giant failed to follow an order to thrash out a fair deal with publishers to use their news content on its platform.
“Over the coming months, we will be working with publishers to reach agreements which cover their rights under the new law”, Google said in the blog post.
In late 2014, Google closed its news aggregation service in Spain following a national law requiring companies like Google to pay publishers for using the links to their articles -- so-called “snippets” -- that describe the content of a story.
In last July, Google hired a new head of public affairs for Spain, Miguel Escassi, who was previously an adviser to the country’s economy minister, who oversees all digital policy.
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