Back in October, Spain’s parliament passed a horribly ill‐advised law at the behest of the Spanish news publishing lobby, the AEDE. Struggling to adapt to the information age in one of Europe’s more troubled economies, the AEDE thought it had hit on a brilliant new revenue source: They got a provision inserted in a new intellectual property law that, starting in January, will force news aggregation sites to pay newspapers for the privilege of linking to their stories.
This never made much sense: News aggregators are a massive source of traffic (and therefore ad revenue) for news sites. In effect, the law seeks to make it more difficult and costly for anyone to give those sites free advertising. Indeed, it’s hard to see the point of posting stories online unless you expect people to link to them, and it’s simple enough to automatically prevent search engines from indexing your site’s content if, for some obscure reason, you don’t want people to have an easy means of discovering your content. But never mind the logic; the law seemed like a foolproof way for ailing news companies to milk a few euros from big tech corporations flush with cash. What could go wrong?
You know how the story ends, right? Everyone but the newspapers themselves seems to have seen it coming, since something similar had just played out in Germany: Google News, the largest of the aggregators, announced last week that they would be shutting down operations in Spain. Since the company didn’t even show ads on its news site, keeping it open under the new regulations would be an unsustainable, money‐losing proposition.
The hilarious coda to the story: The AEDE, which previously complained that news aggregators were “stealing” their work by publishing headlines and tiny snippets of stories, is now begging Spanish regulators to stop Google News from closing. The site’s shuttering, the group complained without irony, “would undoubtedly have a negative impact on citizens and Spanish businesses.” Give them points for chutzpah if nothing else: They’re not even waiting for the blood to dry on the hatchet before bemoaning the loss of their golden eggs.
