Galt's Gulch

Google News service 'Goes Galt' in Spain.

Posted by $ root1657 9 years, 11 months ago to Economics
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New law in Spain would require google to pay other publishers for even listing their headlines (with links to theirs sites). Google News 'Goes Galt' on them.
SOURCE URL: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/the-predictable-result-of-spains-google-tax-no-more-google-news/

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  • Posted by flanap 9 years, 11 months ago
    Because of the size of Google, those who own websites benefit more by Google showing them in search results than those websites allowing Google to show them. Therefore, the website owners should pay Google. Very much like Walmart's ability to negotiate very good pricing with their vendors.
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  • Posted by Temlakos 9 years, 11 months ago
    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.
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  • Posted by FlukeMan2 9 years, 11 months ago
    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...
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  • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 11 months ago
    Well, actually, they aren't "going Galt," they are at best merely taking an economic business action.

    Google is evil.
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    • Posted by $ root1657 9 years, 11 months ago
      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?
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      • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 11 months ago
        No, I would call "going Galt" a political action, that sometimes has economic consequences. Not only the wealthy need withdraw, but any who are productive, even if that productivity were modest. Hence the fishwife in the Gulch.
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        • Posted by $ root1657 9 years, 11 months ago
          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.
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          • Posted by Robbie53024 9 years, 11 months ago
            True enough. I just have a problem with G itself, and they won't get any sympathy from me.
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            • Posted by $ jlc 9 years, 11 months ago
              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
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              • Posted by $ root1657 9 years, 11 months ago
                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.
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