So this happened on Tuesday and I've been chewing on it for two days now: Google actually did it. They shut down Google News in Spain. Not "restricted" it, not "changed the format." The whole edition is just gone as of December 16th. If you're in Madrid or Barcelona and you go to news.google.com/es you get a message saying the service is no longer available in your country. That's it. Four years of aggregating Spanish headlines, done.
Quick background for anyone who hasn't been following: Spain passed this intellectual property law over the summer (everyone's calling it the "Google tax," which, fine, I'll use that too) that says news aggregators have to pay publishers a fee just for linking to and quoting snippets of their articles. Not opt-in, either: it's mandatory and publishers can't waive it even if they want the traffic. Google's answer, announced back on the 11th, was basically "cool, then we won't operate here anymore." And now they haven't.
I keep going back and forth on who's being the bigger baby in this fight, honestly.
On one level I get the publishers' argument, or at least the version of it that isn't just naked resentment of Google's traffic firehose. Aggregators do make money off headlines and snippets that took someone else's reporters and editors to produce. That's a real thing. But writing a law that makes the fee unwaivable is such a strange, self-defeating move: you're basically telling a company "you must pay us even if we'd rather you didn't," and then acting surprised when the company says no thanks and leaves. A bunch of small Spanish outlets that actually relied on Google News for a decent chunk of their traffic are now stuck holding a law that was supposedly written to protect them, minus the traffic that made the law worth caring about in the first place.
And Google isn't some scrappy underdog here either. Pulling out entirely instead of paying is also a message, and the message is "we're big enough that we get to set the terms, and if a country disagrees we just leave that market." Which, sure, is their right as a company operating a free product, but let's not pretend it's some principled free-speech stand. It's a business decision dressed up in a blog post about how much they value publishers.
What I find genuinely interesting, more than the legal fight itself, is what happens next in Spain's actual news ecosystem. Early numbers I've seen floating around (nothing official yet, this is two days old) suggest a decent chunk of Google News Spain's referral traffic doesn't come back through other channels, people don't just switch over to visiting five newspaper homepages instead of one aggregator, they mostly just... stop checking as often. Which is such a boring, obvious outcome that apparently nobody involved in writing this law thought about it.
Also, minor aside, but I spent way too long last night trying to figure out if this sets any kind of precedent for Germany, which has its own smaller version of this fight going on with Google over ancillary copyright (the LSR law, if you want to look it up). My guess is Germany watches Spain eat this traffic loss for a few months and quietly backs off enforcing anything similar too hard. Prediction, not a fact, take it for what it's worth.
I'll say this much: I use Google News constantly, mostly out of habit at this point rather than because it's the best tool for the job (Twitter is honestly faster for breaking stuff most days), and the idea of it just not existing in an entire country is a little jarring. Not "the internet is falling apart" jarring, just a reminder that these free aggregator products everyone treats like plumbing are actually sitting on top of a pile of legal arrangements that can get yanked out from under them by a single national law.
Obviously the bigger story dominating every tech site's front page this week is the Sony situation and the fallout from the theater chains pulling "The Interview," and I get why — it's a much bigger, uglier mess. But this Spain thing is the one I can't stop turning over, mostly because it's such a clean little case study in two sides both being technically right and still ending up with a worse outcome than if either one had just blinked.