[LINK] ACCC's Mandatory Media Bargaining Code

[Kim Holburn]

On 2020/07/31 4:40 pm, Karl Auer wrote:
> On Fri, 2020-07-31 at 15:50 +1000, Kim Holburn wrote:
>> https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141212/07360229413/surprise-spanish-newspapers-beg-government-eu-to-stop-google-news-shutting-down.shtml
>>
> 
> Why does no-one in Spain or elsewhere see this as an absolutely god-
> given opportunity for a (probably Spanish-speaking) entity to set up a
> news search service for Spanish-language news?
> 
> Or even just Euro-zone generally?
> 
> Regards, K.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150725/14510131761/study-spains-google-tax-news-shows-how-much-damage-it-has-done.shtml

> When it came time for Spain to try to appease its misguided and angry publishers, the government sought to avoid the tactics that Google had done in the past and thus made it mandatory to pay, saying that sites themselves couldn't even opt-out of getting payments, even if they didn't want them. In response to this, Google broke out the somewhat surprising "nuclear option" and shut down Google News in Spain entirely. It seemed quite obvious that this move would create huge problems for media properties that wanted to be open and wanted people to link to them. 

...

> However, the really telling part of the report is that this law that was passed in the name of helping news publications, ended up doing tremendous harm to many online publications -- especially smaller sites that frequently (and happily) relied on Google News and other aggregators for a significant amount of traffic. The report points out that it wasn't just Google News that shut down because of this law: a whole bunch of local Spanish aggregators shut down themselves, switched business models entirely, or similarly left the Spanish market entirely.