Spain Passes The Google Tax
Spain passed a law that will give Spanish newspaper publishers the right to get paid from any site that links to them with what they deem a ” meaningful ” description of the content. It is important to note that this law does not apply to all publishers in Spain, only daily newspapers.
From QZ.com
On July 22 Spain passed a law (link in Spanish) called the canon AEDE, after the acronym for Spain’s daily newspapers’ association. The law has been dubbed the tasa Google (“Google tax”) in the Spanish press and gives these publishers the right to seek payment from any site that links to their content with a “meaningful” description of the work.
Though the government hastened to clarify (Spanish) that the law won’t apply to social networks like Twitter and Facebook, what it means for search engines such as Google and sites like Digg or Reddit—or even Quartz—is still quite unclear. What’s a “meaningful” description? How much compensation is due per link? Who arbitrates in the event of a dispute? And in a world where every news outlet writes the same story, what is exclusive content? The fine for violation of the law is as much as €300,000 (Spanish) and one study says it would cost internet firms €1.13 billion euros (Spanish).
As Quartz points out, this is not the first country to implement this,
But Spain is not the first European country to try to force Google to pay them instead. Germany passed a similar law last year, which will soon be put to the test: Several of Germany’s major publishers last month demanded Google pay them 11% of its revenue from linking to their content. (What they’ll demand from ad-free Google News isn’t clear.) Google has also resolved copyright disputes over linking with both French and francophone Belgian news publishers by funneling more money their way.
Read the full article here
Finally someone fights back! And it DOES take a national government at this point in order to stand up to Google, which has grown (parasitically) too large for individuals or even the largest companies to contend with. It takes governments, that is, with the backing of a whole industry being bled dry.
I am no Google fan boy, but I think we have to be careful Joseph in applauding this move, I think newspapers and the like get a lot of traffic from Google as well. I mean if I am Google and this is law I wipe out all these publications from the serps.
Admittedly, I’m a bit extreme in my antipathy for Google and overstate the case from time to time. And I acknowledge that the tax may not turn out to be devised or implemented well. But I do wish to applaud the principle of charging Google when it siphons away advertising dollars from content producers.
We’re seeing the newspapers in the West strangled by Google. Those that don’t go under have adulterated their content and sacrificed their journalistic principles in order to mix advertising with good faith reporting of reality. This is too important not to combat, however crudely.
Newspapers thrived for centuries before a website named Google interposed itself as gate keeper between people and the information they seek. So if Google drops all newspaper websites from its SERPs, people will seek their news outside Google confines. And Google’s stranglehold on commerce and the information economy will loosen in a healthy way. Publishers will then attract unmediated advertising dollars and, with the more reliable revenue they previously enjoyed, perhaps return to their main job of fact finding and editorial objectivity.
Do you have a blog, Joseph?
nope
Sigh, another government that does not get the internet.
I wonder how those publishers who are cheering right now would react if Google stopped linking to their freely provided content altogether.
If you put something online for free, you should expect and accept that others will link to it. If you don’t want that, put it behind a pay-wall.
Linking freely to content is one thing.
Linking to content while seducing the publishers’ advertisers is another.
Instead of paying the content producer to appear alongside original content, advertisers now pay the link scraper to show up next to the link. Or, in the case of Youtube, copyrighted material is stolen quite brazenly. These practices are essentially parasitic. If search engines are to exist symbiotically with actual content producers, then revenue must flow bidirectionally.
I think more people now get their links to news and read news from Twitter and Facebook and this tax will not apply to social media sites.
I agree with you 100 % I never understood what they get away with on You Tube, I look up a song that they don’t own and its not on the VEVO channel, so I see an ad before the song and wonder how can they get ad money for this ?
The Global Consumer Community is tired of Google , manipulating digital routing code. Anyone owning Google stock should be concerned about this practice. Look deeper as joseph has.
Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger) (Domain Master)
I don’t think its thinking that deeply (No offense Joseph you know I like and read your comments) Its something that has been talked about for a long time, but I can say friends of mine here, proudly boast they will never buy or read the Philadelphia Inquirer, they will read stories from there online that they find on Google news, Twitter and Facebook.
No matter how much you dislike Google Jeff or I have problems with aspects of Google, they are still a very popular company that the average user values over other publishers, as someone who makes their living in online publishing I certainly want to see more of the balance that Joseph talks about and constantly think of ways to do “Non – Google” promotion, you need traffic and advertisers from many different sources.
The thing not lost on me, is my friends and the public at large don’t care, Google gives them what they want for the most part. If people cared they would have taken action long ago, how easy is it to type DuckDuckGo.com instead of Google.com ? Two seconds and you have a search engine that does not have the info or tracks you like Google does.
I have listened to people complain about Google for years, why haven’t domainers upset with falling parking revenue boycotted them on principle ? I am sure a few will say, “I have boycotted Google” but I mean every last domainer who parks domain names and monetizes them.
For a lot of people Google gives them what they want conveniently, people a lot of times choose convenience over outrage for the small business getting screwed over, just so long as it is not their small business.
Google isn’t the antichrist. They provide a lot of convenient services. And they bloody well ought to. With enough money to vacuum up the best engineers and buy out just about any promising startup, we’d expect Google to be on the other end of more than a few top-notch products — many of which they had little involvement with developing.
Those tools are convenient. Competing services don’t really exist (apart from Microsoft) because they and their patents tend to be bought out by Google. It’s the dream of most startups to have precisely that kind of lucrative exit that selling out to Google provides.
Again, the tools are really convenient. Undoubtedly, the world would lose out by eschewing them merely because they’re “tainted” with Google ownership.
It’s really not for the average consumer to boycott Google. Directly, we gain more than we lose by using Google. Indirectly and in the long term, we lose. But people mainly protest only direct harm.
It’s incumbent on the industries and publishers who are directly losing to Google to organize in protest — not the average web consumer or even the average webmaster. I’m talking about the music industry, the film industry, the news industry, and the larger Google advertisers such as Amazon.com who are funding a company that is more and more competing against them using their own advertising dollars.
Ideally antitrust laws would have functioned to prevent the status quo, but U.S. lobbyists have effectively wedged that door so that it won’t shut. What amazes me is that the big industries that have lost out to Google didn’t put a stop to this years ago while they were the Goliaths to Google’s David. At this point, even those major industries find themselves in the inverted role, as underdogs.
Domainers really don’t amount to much as a force for Google to reckon with. Not in terms of parking. For me personally, parking revenue has never been anything other than negligible. But I doubt even the largest parking companies have much bargaining power. Parking just isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. So I don’t fault domainers for doing nothing. What could they possibly do?
I do like seeing publishers like TheDomains.com and DomainNameWire.com enlisting their own advertisers, though, instead of making themselves dependent on AdSense.
Sorry, Raymond, for hijacking your page.
P.S. I do think social media sites and aggregators that mediate between information seekers and information should be required to pay content producers a portion of their advertising revenue. It’s a systemic problem, and Google is just the largest symptom.
No problem at all Joseph I enjoy the conversation. I think there are plenty of people that don’t like Google but they don’t want to see people paid for links or stuff along those lines.
I know you said social media sites and aggregators, not sure how that could work and why would anyone run those types of sites.
A lot of blogs this one included is Content curation, now I try to always pay attention to how much is quoted and leave a big portion of the story for readers to click through too, as a writer I try to take care of the writer and mention their name and a link to their profile besides just the article link if available.
I would never pay, I would maybe read articles and then email if we got an environment like what Spain wants, at least for their newspapers.
I think we go down a slippery slope, I mean I know you don’t have a blog, but if you did and I quote 200 words of a 2000 word blog post, I am going to bring you traffic if it is written here on TheDomains. So I think I am helping you by doing that, I look at a minimum of 250 stories in a day, headlines not reading the full 250 but reading headline and usually opening blurb, so if there are 5 that get written about I think that is doing that writer a favor, it is less of a favor to a TechCrunch writer because that is a bigger blog than this one, but to JosephP.com I think that has value to you which you got for free.
Here is the problem with Google as I see it, they are already so big, they have a ton of info that they could use in a myriad of ways if people started giving them the Digital Middle Finger.
The Music Industry (RIAA) and Movies (MPAA) are far more despised especially from the future of the Internet, those 12 -22.
This is a topic that will be going on for decades, I wish you good health and I hope I am healthy, we could still be writing and commenting on these IP/Copyright issues in 2034.
You have generations growing up believing only suckers pay for content, look at Porn, what 18 year old thinks yeah I am going to pay for that ? There are millions of videos for free, unless you have some unique, very, very odd fetish that the few producers can keep tabs on, everything anyone else could want is free.
Google partakes in that, they are not making money but video.google will show you videos of your favorite pornstar for pages and pages.
This is a huge issue far bigger than Spain protecting their newspapers, A lot of people don’t value online content, some do but think it should be cheaper and then there are those that pay full boat.
Newspapers have to look into the mirror at themselves and not just Google, they were in position to get every Geo.com, they should have been regging names in 1994, not saying this Internet thingy will never work, they were just like the buggy makers saying that automobile is a fad.
I care about what Google does to small business with all their own products on the first page, carousels and Google PLA make it hard for a small business without a big Adwords budget to be found in some niches.
For clarification, I don’t find content curation as you practice it to be objectionable. It’s rather like reading a book and coming across a half-page quotation plus a foot note. That, of course, has always been standard practice. The difference online is that the foot note leads directly to the article cited; and I (for one) frequently stop to view the quotes in their original context.
Content curation like this adds commentary and occasionally fosters discussions (like this one). Google does no such thing — Google Plus notwithstanding. Probably social media are more like this blog than like Google in their use of links. Maybe it’s just a slippery slope, but I suspect firmer criteria / dividing lines could be identified.
Advertisers on TheDomains.com are unlikely to be the same advertisers found on the publications you reference, Raymond. Most of the time, there is no direct competition. If you were citing another website in the same niche as TheDomains.com and including the bulk of its original text within your post, then people might be frustrated. But mainly what I see you doing is introducing content and websites to an audience that wouldn’t otherwise find it — a good thing.
What I mainly object to when it comes to Google is that this company inserts itself directly between people who can already find each other without Google’s help and then also competes directly against some (and increasingly more) of the content producers that draw customers to Google in the first place. Indeed, rather than leading people to new content, Google often places already familiar brands and information sources in a setting surrounded by their rivals — including Google itself — the objective being to expose websites to greater risk and more competition in order to extract maximum PPC revenue.
No kidding is this an endless topic! My own comments may have become interminable; so I’d better stop.
I guess it’s time to call the debate.
“Convenience”, such as Google provides, in some corners, is the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty, but in others, it is the British meaning, a Public Toilet. I have never looked at Google’s mission to be anything that saves or simplifies work, adds to my ease or comfort. I can only speak for myself. I see Peterson as subjecting Google to specific criticisms rather than rejecting them in toto.
And that’s proper.
Due to the foregoing, and all of Peterson’s standpoint, position, viewpoint, outlook, attitude, perspective, and persuasion here, I call this debate for him.
BTW Peterson:
I have a pitch for you. At your earliest convenience go to YouSpar.com and take a look at the website. I was working on the project, but I have changed my mind. I think you should take it over and give it the attention it requires. You may make a big hit of a Social debate platform of it. You can certainly work the debate on the following Categories :
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@Domenclature,
Thanks for the invitation and the vote of confidence. As things are, I’m actually behind on a dozen projects of my own or promised to others. So I know I couldn’t manage a website beyond that — not even with a head start.