Google announced on Thursday that it is shutting down its Google News service in Spain in Dec. 16 in response to a new intellectual property law.
The new law requires news-linking services like Google News to pay Spanish publications for displaying their contents on the site. The search engine giant questioned the new legislation as it is not earning money from the service so paying the publications is not feasible.
"It's with real sadness that on 16 December we'll remove Spanish publishers from Google News, and close Google News in Spain," said Richard Gingras, head of Google News in a blog post on Wednesday.
"Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site)," he said.
Violators of the new law can be fined up to $748,000, according to The Guardian.
The new intellectual property law stemmed from a complaint of global news publishers that Google is infringing their copyrights by creating a headlines list online. Beginning January, Google, and other web aggregators would have to pay licensing fees to the publishers when snippets of the articles are displayed with the headlines, BBC News reported.
Publishers who are willing have their news stories posted in Google News must provide permission to Google, according to Reuters.
Having a story show in the headlines list is proven to generate traffic to the news websites and attract advertisers. Gingras said that Google News is driving more than 10 billion clicks per month. But, it seems that Google doesn't want to complicate things, so it decided just to shut down Google News Spain. After all, Google News is available in 70 countries and 35 languages.
"We're committed to helping the news industry meet that challenge and look forward to continuing to work with our thousands of partners globally, as well as in Spain, to help them increase their online readership and revenues," Gingras wrote.
