I would have thought that those in European nations would have learned from their mistakes by now. Spain did this, initially only some companies demanded money and so Google just removed them from the index. Then the companies realised it was a disaster.
Then the Spanish government made it mandatory for everyone to pay the media companies, regardless - and they weren't allowed to do it directly either. They had to pay the state, who then paid the publisher. Nobody was allowed to opt-out. So Google News pulled out entirely. It was an unmitigated disaster... for the publishers:
Whatever loss of traffic occurs due to readers who may read a news aggregator and then choose not to read an entire story, is more than made up for by the "market expansion" effect, the study found. In other words, given access to a news aggregator like Google, people read much more news.
The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.
I hate to say this, because I'm generally anti- big company. But the major players on the internet need to band together and act collectively. If google, microsoft, facebook, amazon, etc. responded by blocking access, I think the EU would straighten out pretty quickly.
Actually, it would be better to create a decentralised, anonymous linking protocol. How this could be done, I have no idea.
That would legitimise Torrent link trackers :-) Kind of the Spanish governments worst nightmare really. It would mean that they couldn't stop the link trackers, there would be a band of citizens who summarised news articles and made other citizens more politically active and it would help spread pirated content.
It would also cut out the middle man (Google News).
How much do you think Google earns with News? I'm pretty sure they would simply shut down the service EU-wide, and continue providing just their core business, Google Search.
If it becomes uneconomic, then that's precisely what Google will have to do. What I suspect will then happen is that news outlets will have to offshore their news distribution to outside of Europe. Ironic, really.
The joke is that they tried to retreat... Yes, this is the same gov that taxes the sun... (and probably soon will try to rent cubic meters of air so the spaniards can breathe)
Then the Spanish government made it mandatory for everyone to pay the media companies, regardless - and they weren't allowed to do it directly either. They had to pay the state, who then paid the publisher. Nobody was allowed to opt-out. So Google News pulled out entirely. It was an unmitigated disaster... for the publishers:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/07/new-study-shows-s...
To quote that article:
Whatever loss of traffic occurs due to readers who may read a news aggregator and then choose not to read an entire story, is more than made up for by the "market expansion" effect, the study found. In other words, given access to a news aggregator like Google, people read much more news.
The NERA analysis found a 6 percent overall drop in traffic from the Spanish Google News closure and a 14 percent drop for smaller publications. Those numbers are slightly smaller than a GigaOm analysis from last year, which found traffic drop-offs of 10 to 15 percent.