Google News

2022

Google News returns to Spain after a seven-year hiatus

The original law, which prompted Google News to leave Spain, required all news aggregators to pay a collective fee to the Spanish media industry for the right to share headlines and excerpts from news publishers. The law was directly directed against Google News, and instead of paying a commission, Google decided to close its news service in Spain. There were even fears that it could completely close in Europe.

In 2019, the EU adopted a law called the European Copyright Directive. The corresponding fragment is article 15, which allows news publishers to charge for posting links or extracts from their content.

After this law was adopted in the EU, member states had two years to update their legislation, which Spain and other EU members are now doing.

In May 2022, Spain eases its restrictions on the exchange of links in response to new rules established in the EU capital Brussels, and Google said it would resume its news service in Spain in early 2023.

Blocking in Russia for fake news

March 23, 2022 against the backdrop of Russia's special operation in Ukraine, Roskomnadzor announced the blocking of Google News for spreading fake news.

2021: France fined Google €500 million euros for refusing to pay local media

In July 2021, the French antitrust regulator fined Google €500 million ($593 million dollars).

The search giant did not comply with the order to conclude an honest deal with publishers for the use of their news content on its platform.

Alphabet Inc. ignored the 2020 decision to negotiate in good faith to show fragments of articles on its Google News service.

2019: Google trains its AI to prevent a repeat of the "Trump situation"

On June 25, 2019, it became known that it was Google working to prevent USA a repeat of the "situation with" Trump that had developed in 2016 in the presidential election in 2020. This was announced in a private conversation by the head of the responsible innovation department of Google Jen Gennai. The conversation was recorded on a hidden camera by Project Veritas, which is investigating corruption, fraud and human rights violations. As you know, after the 2016 elections, a number of scandals erupted in the United States related to the spread of fake news during the election period and other attempts to influence the consciousness of voters through large Internet sites.

Project Veritas also has documents that show what Google is guided by when it prioritizes content from various news publishers. The company's goal is to reduce the risk of distributing poor-quality and inaccurate information through Google News in order to get a "single point of truth" for all Google services, the documentation reads. More details here.

2014: Service closure in Spain

In December 2014, it became known that the new law on intellectual property requires all Spanish media to charge for the use of fragments of their publications on other sites, even if these fragments are small in size and even if the publisher himself does not want it, writes in the official blog Google News head Richard Gingras.

Google is not satisfied with this, since on the news portal it does not show advertising, and therefore does not earn money. Therefore, since December 16, 2014, Google News stops working in Spain. Moreover, the news of the Spanish media will not be shown on the global website Google News.

The law, which has been in force in Spain since the beginning of 2015, makes compensation for the use of fragments of publications by news aggregators an inalienable right of publishers. In Germany, a similar law only allows publishers to claim compensation, but does not require it. After Google announced that it would not show fragments of news from some well-known German sites in the search results, publishers were forced to cede and refuse payment requirements. Spanish publishers cannot do this, emphasize in Google.