Spain Wants Google News Back, After Removal

It looks like the Spanish Newspaper Publishers’ Association (AEDE) is unhappy with Google’s dismissal of the new revenue split for Google News. Under a new Spanish law, all headlines that appeared on Google News would be paid for by Google, prior to the listing on Google News. In response to the new law, Google pulled its news service out of the country. In under a week, the AEDE is claiming Google is remaining neutral and does not want to work with the association.

Irene Lanzaco, a spokeswoman for AEDE, spoke to The Spain Report via telephone about the situation “we’re not asking Google to take a step backwards, we’ve always been open to negotiations with Google … Google has not taken a neutral stance.”

“Of course they are free to close their business, but one thing is the closure of Google News and quite another the positioning in the general index”

It is unclear what these negotiations would include, considering the AEDE implemented the new law without any discussion on Google’s end. The AEDE clearly didn’t see Google simply removing the service entirely in under a week. Several publishers in Spain have argued against the new law, claiming it is bad for business. Google News can bring hundreds of thousands of views in per week for large scale publishers, and even small publishers are able to get views due to the application process being open for any and all websites.

Google has always worked on a “my way or no way” deal. It force them out of the Chinese search market, when the government began requesting too much censoring. It has also pulled them out of the engineering market in Russia, due to new server laws. The removal from Google News will affect the general index for Spanish publishers, meaning they will lower down in the rankings compared to other sites.

Several European countries have tried to tax Google News, but each has learned its lesson rather quickly. This new charade should end soon, unless the AEDE is happy with publishers losing income.