On: Google News to shut down in Spain

[jessriedel]

Can someone comment on the goal behind designing the Spanish law this way?

I speculate that they consider Google News to have monopolistic power, so that even if a fair market in snippets would set a finite price Google News would still use its clout to drive that price to zero by removing individual papers who tried to charge. A mandatory price would counter act this, similar to the way that government mandates to publish open access give bargaining power to the researchers over oligopolies like Nature and Science.

[notatoad → jessriedel]

I believe the goal/logic is "we want money. Google has lots of money, we should try and get some of that"

[lotu → notatoad]

You also have to consider that the publishing industry is really hurting because of people moving online and the press has a lot of political power.

[seanmcdirmid → jessriedel]

I think this would be much more monopolistic if Google charged publishers for the right to be listed in Google News. If Google News was arbitrarily picky about content they listed, that would be akin to censorship.

[kalleboo → seanmcdirmid]

"censorship" is too strong a word but it would be a barrier to entry to new entrants. Similar situation to the net neutrality debate. News neutrality?

[prawn → jessriedel]

I think the goal is to placate local, entrenched media.

Big news companies have complained for years about aggregation yet generally sulked when it's been removed (see Germany).

[magicalist → jessriedel]

What is a "fair market in snippets"? I'm having trouble imagining a market of companies bidding on being able to include a sentence from a news article.

This seems much more like the reverse, where indeed the government is trying to prevent individual publishers from benefiting over others by not charging for snippets of their stories, but it seems much more in service of propping up the existing oligopoly of the news world.

[hggchgfhgfhg → jessriedel]

To avoid what happened in Germany.