Google News, Google's news aggregator, will return to work in Spain seven years after its closure. The news was announced on November 3 on the official blog of Alphabet, the holding company that controls Google.
The return of Google News to Spain was made possible by the approval of a decree by the Spanish government that transposes the new European copyright rules: the decree allows publishers to request a commission from online platforms that show extracts of their news; and allows platforms, such as Google, to negotiate with individual publishers a fee for indexing their news, without going through a collective agreement, as was previously foreseen in Spain.
Google explained that thanks to the new copyright law, the news aggregator will be able to return to work in Spain at the beginning of 2022. In addition, the law will allow the company to activate Google News Showcase in Spain, a recently launched platform in which they are shown articles chosen by editorial staff considered reliable and prestigious.
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Google News had stopped working in Spain in December 2014, after the Spanish parliament passed a copyright law which, among other things, provided for the payment of copyright to newspapers by search engines that showed previews of theirs. articles. Google had harshly criticized the approval of the law and said that under such conditions it could not have maintained its service.
A newsletter on the damned future of newspapers Whether they are paper or online, we understand better what they tell us if you know how they are changing every week. To receive it, write your email address here and press the button below. Having read the information, I agree to send the Newsletter However, the news remained accessible in Spain via Google. Only Google News, the service that groups and sorts the news of the main newspapers, dividing them by topic, had stopped working, but the “News” filter on the search results page remained active: in this case the news is not aggregated by topics, as in Google News, but simply listed according to the search key entered by users.
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