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Comment by ma2rten | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Spain try to do the same thing with Google News, which just ended up with them shutting down the product in Spain?

https://support.google.com/news/publisher-center/answer/9609...

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The article says that European countries "tried and failed" to rein in the tech giants. Although I'm not sure if shutting down Google News is actually "tried and failed" so much as "tried and succeeded, but not according to first preference".

I mean, if you can't go to google news to get your news, maybe you do go directly to the website of some major news company (and get a monoculture).

Don't remember the details, but I know smaller publishers were hit pretty hard by Google News closing in Spain.

While it's not the selling point politically, I think those lobbying for things like this are very much happy with any monoculture that results.

With services like Google News, people can get exposed to news from various media outlets, but by killing it through lobbying for absurd regulatory burdens on aggregators the well known larger outlets can choke out access to their competition. This of course is hampered to some extent by the reality that many will just rely on other users posting on social media for news updates, and if that too is choked out through regulation on platforms, many will probably just skip the news or reduce their consumption in favor of other things like entertainment.

I used to use Google News to find different articles from different companies whenever a news story interested me. It was good to get often very different points of view.

I now just spend a little time on Apple News+ to skim what is happening. While I am locking myself more into a mono culture just looking at US news, I decided that I needed to greatly decrease the amount of time I spent on the news every day.

The world situation is what it is. I try to accept the world as-is, invest as little time as possible understanding the world and concentrate on my own productivity, fellowship with friends and family, and generally appreciating culture and nature.

News watching is an addiction that too many of my friends have.

Danish news have never been on Google News, even though Google News launched in Sweden and Norway. Back around 2005-2006, the Danish newspapers fought hard to forbid "systematic deep linking" to their news.

We're still able to find Danish news by Google search though, it's only the aggregation that Danish media is afraid of, as they are afraid to loose out on a lot of income on the ads they show while people browse their websites.

Yup. I was in Spain from March to May. It was annoying to be in the habit of typing "news.google.com" when trying to get news on COVID-19. It wasn't hard to bypass, but it was annoying.

I like how they recommend the Mexican edition instead

Which makes no sense, except for international news... And maybe not even that

It wasn't for me it's hard, in reverse. I no longer live in Spain, haven't for 10 years. But every time I go to Google News I get the message of it not being available in my country. My primary language in my Google account isn't Spanish, my address isn't in Spain, my Google Wallet has a non Spanish card on it, so on and so forth, yet I can only access Google News when I'm logged out.

Off topic but I had the same issue. Did you change your Google payment profile? (which has nothing to do with all the profile addresses you can set in various places)

https://support.google.com/paymentscenter/answer/9028746?hl=...

Because you can't actually change your country on your Google payment profile. You need to create a new one and then switch the new one.

I had to do this to switch my US account to an EU account with the EU GDPR user consent options. Your Google account is tied to the payment profile country AFAIK.

Already done, payment profile isn't Spain either. The fact that Google user support is literal black hole made me just accept this fact.

A similar thing happened to me. All of Google's products (Search, Maps, Translate, etc.) come up for me in Dutch.

The weird part is, I am not Dutch, do not speak Dutch, and have never been to the Netherlands.

Plot twist... You live in the north of Belgium & speak Flemish.

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