Spanish publishers lobbied to tax Google for giving them a free service that it wasn't making any money on. Now that Google has shut down the service, they are lobbying the government to force Google to keep the service running. If anything feels like it was copied out of Atlas Shrugged then this does.


"As expected, Google removed all Spanish publishers from its Google News index on Tuesday, which the company said it was forced to do as a result of a new law — a law that publishers themselves lobbied for — which requires anyone using even a short snippet of copyrighted content to pay a fee. According to the web-analytics service Chartbeat, within hours of their removal from the Google service, Spanish media sites saw their external traffic fall by double digits."

"Spanish publishers are now asking for help from the government because of the impact of the law, even though Google warned that it would have to remove their links if the law was passed (any links to Spanish sites are also removed from other content on non-Spanish versions of Google News, but they remain available through a regular Google search)."

https://gigaom.com/2014/12/16/traffic-to...

They've also gone back on the mandatory G+ issue. There's an article about it somewhere on ars technica, but I don't have the link handy. As I recall, the whole thing was because of an overzealous employee who is no longer in that position.

I have avoided Google when possible since they enacted their new SOP's that required me to sign up for G+ before I could access my old emails. I would completely agree that the could require one to sign up for something in order to send NEW emails, but the past ones should have been held in trust under the conditions that pertained during the in which they were sent - which (at the prior time) did not require signing up for G+.

Jan

I don't think anyone is saying only the wealthy need withdraw, but I don't think you can discount them just because they are wealthy either. Google brought the knowledge and provided services that let others find these publishers more easily, and as we've seen in other places, there is strong evidence that google is actually driving business to the people they link. Spain passed a parasitic law to loot google, and they have chosen to shrug the situation and withdraw from the market rather than have looters bleed them. Sure there are political as well as economic implications involved, but google could also just as well have paid these fees and done just fine. They instead decided to withdraw their services, and it may not matter why. The looters came, and the producer stopped producing.

Google flexes a muscle that governments don't even have.

good for google, bad for the individuals who have used this service and. once again government intervention hurts the citizen.

The last time Google made any sort of accommodation was in mainland China. That got them nothing but a black eye. They won't make that mistake again.

Completely disagree. They have decided that it is no longer worth their effort to continue to provide their service to people who will bleed them to death for providing it.

And isn't going galt a business action? often economic?