Google News Has To Shut Down In Spain

Google will be shutting down Google News in Spain following a new copyright legislation that lets publishers charge Internet companies for their content that is aggregated by any other service. 

Google News will close on Dec. 16, before the law takes effect next year in January. 

The situation in Spain is somewhat like the situation in Germany where publishers argued that the Google should compensate for using their excerpt in service. However, German publishers later accepted that Google News was valuable enough to their businesses and hence the compensation can be excused. 

However, Spain has gone ahead and actually implemented the law. 

"This new legislation requires every Spanish publication to charge services like Google News for showing even the smallest snippet from their publications, whether they want to or not. As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site) this new approach is simply not sustainable," Richard Gingras, head of Google News, wrote in a blog post.

Google will also remove all Spanish publishers from its international version of Google News. 

Google News is four year old service, available in 70 global edition and 35 different languages.