Spain to force search engines to pay

"Spain to force search engines to pay to display some content" is the full article title.

Here’s a twist. Wondering how it will affect Bing as part of 8.1 search. Will it drive up OS cost?

MADRID: News media companies in Spain will be able to charge search engines such as Google for displaying copyrighted content under a new law proposed by the Spanish government on Friday.

The measure echoes similar drives around Europe. Publishers in Portugal, France, Belgium and Germany have pushed for compensation in some form or another for links, snippets, headlines and lead paragraphs that appear in news search engines and aggregators such as Google News and Yahoo news.

Spain to force search engines to pay to display some content - DAWN.COM
 
I seem to remember Google having the same issue with France, Brazil, Belgium, etc. and likened it to "taxing a taxi driver for taking tourists to eat at a particular restaurant" with the result being "Less information would be available online".

If I were Google, Yahoo and Bing, I'd comply with their demands and remove all indexing of all news sites in those countries and instead direct search queries to translated news sites/newswires in other countries that don't have such restrictions. Then give their organisations the option to opt-in under contract, which allows the search engine free licence to index, aggregate and link to their sites. Take it or leave it.

Unless I'm missing something, I can only assume their motivation is pure greed to make extra money from the large amount of search engine traffic. If it wasn't, then surely the news outlets could just use robots.txt to prevent search engines indexing their sites.

What the newspapers should have been doing is screaming from the rafters years ago about how good RSS feeds are and getting everyone visiting their site (not just the more geeky types) using their feeds to get people clicking on their articles daily. As it is, hardly anyone outside tech circles even seem to know they exist and have certainly never been heavily promoted by newspapers.
 

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Very good points and suggestions there, Arc. :thumb: I couldn't agree more.

The only thing I could add is that the government is playing the Devil's advocate. Not only are they taxing the revenue search engines are making off of ads, but now they'll gain tax off the media companies for revenue they gain from search engines. What a merry-go-round! It's like a double header win for them.

Bottom line in all of this is that we the consumers will lose out because all of it will be absorbed in the price of products. Government > The biggest cause of inflation.
 

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