Tech

Google News returns to Spain on the twentieth anniversary of the news service

The Internet giant’s news service, Google News, is available again in Spain for almost eight years after a closure motivated by the approval of the reform of the Spanish Intellectual Property Law in 2014.

The return of Google News to Spain is good news for users and the media and coincides with the service’s twentieth anniversary. The company explains it by updating the copyright law that “allows Spanish media, large and small, to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and monetized”.

If you remember, Google closed News in December 2014 when the absolute majority of the Popular Party approved a -regrettable- reform of the Intellectual Property Law that approved legislative pearls such as the imposition of the digital canon, the limitation of private copying, the criminalization of links for those responsible for websites or the increase in penalties for the owners of shops selling console modifier chips.

Driven by the dictation of the AEDE (the SGAE of the media and a coalition of natural enemies united to the cry of ‘everything for money’), the regulation intended to collect tens of millions of euros by charging a tax for its contents and also for those of third parties, creating a right inalienable by which every regularly updated website would automatically generate a collection right on any other website that links it.

The result is known. Criticism of Internet users, media and large aggregators to the norm, due to the potential millionaire losses of virtual media; the limitation of the right to information; the attack on freedom of the press; legal insecurity or obstacles to innovation, did not take effect and the reform was definitively approved. Google had already warned that I wouldn’t pay a single euro to AEDE and finally closed the service, making Spain the first country where it was suspended.

Google News returns to Spain

The service returns through a dedicated web portal and a specific application that will be available soon on Android and iOS. The site has been updated in design and its objective is the same as it was twenty years ago when it started worldwide: “helping readers find news from credible sources, from the world’s largest news websites to small, local and specialist publications”.

As you will see, the design matches the recent interface revamp made for all international versions of News on the desktop, with the main novelty of moving the main topics to the top of the screen to better accommodate other columns such as featured and local news. The underlying idea of ​​the design is that the user has the feeling of reading a newspaper, but on a website.

Google News returns to Spain

Its operation is known. Google News directs readers to websites when they click on links, helping drive traffic to third-party content. In this sense, Google has announced that it intends to work with publishers to launch Google News Showcase in Spain, a program of products under license, which pays publishers to generate especially careful content, intended for panels from Google News and Discover stories.

The return of Google News to Spain coincides with the twentieth anniversary of the launch of the service and It is good news for media and users. “We trust that the return of Google News to Spain will help many more people find the news they are looking for, from diverse and reliable sources of all sizes, inside and outside Spain, and provide even more support for journalists and editors who work tirelessly to tell us the news»they explain from the Internet giant.

Google News is present in 125 countries and 40 languages, generating 24 billion clicks to publishers’ websites each month. And now again in Spain. From where he should never have left…

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