Spain's 'Google tax'
sharecast.com
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Which makes me question this article. Did they really pass a law requiring payment for quoting small parts of an article? Seems unlikely. Paying for merely linking to a site would be even crazier.
This will do wonders for the SEO of these newspapers, not to mention their presence at all in the discourse.
Is this law retroactive? What do you do with the already existing links on the Spanish web and Spanish wikipedia ? It's not just a Google tax, it's a Hypertext tax.
Google+, Twitter, Facebook and other social networks won't be subject to this tax.
Google would presumably stop returning results for Spanish content to avoiding getting charged, resulting in dropped traffic, and less ad dollars.
These newspapers sales on-paper are dropping alarmingly. They're looking at this as a way to monetize their online versions.
What has already happened: A major spanish social link aggregator (a-la-digg) is boicotting these newspapers.
What will happen: Google will remove them from the index. They'll lose exposure, and therefore make even less.
It's ridiculous how fucking idiotic our politicians can be and people still keep voting them.
EDIT: Typo.
Sure, but be prepared to say goodbye to your high-end medical system, social rights (e.g. same-sex marriage, unemployment benefits), food culture, etc.
First taxing the sun
More opinion: http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/07/26/spanish-congress-co...
Maybe someone who speaks Spanish could provide a more detailed article? The English-language web appears to be shallow this time.
Living in Germany myself, the cynic in me can already envision the German adaptation of this, which would include the same definition of the crime, but they would allow arbitrary lawyers to send cost notices of, say, €10k to private individuals and owners of small websites. The €300k will then only be enforced if you don't pay up. While that is going on, large companies will do backroom deals so they can carry on like before.
These laws are never designed to stop Google, Twitter, or Facebook. They'll be just fine, as long as they pay enough behind the scenes. It's always about the little guys.
The main political parties have economic interest in mass media companies (like PRISA group). They are covering the hand who feds them.
Talking with other citiziens, they have no idea about this law being passed or does not support it.
Thanks to OP for posting it here.
People joke in Latin America about Spaniards because of their remarkably low knowledge of foreign languages and outside culture, or the fact that they watch American films overdubbed whereas others just watch them with subtitles.
It's a subtle thing, but there's a perception, to me not unfounded, that some sectors of Spanish society just don't look outward much, which is the reason they get these crazy ideas that wouldn't even be considered for a second anywhere else.
Does not that contradicts the fact that, for example, Spain has one of the largest high-speed train networks in the world, that the electricity they produce is >50% from renewable sources, that big civil engineering companies are involved with building major infrastructure around the world (including airport terminals at Heathrow, Sydney), that their medical service is within the top ten in the world, that same-sex marriage has been completely legal (including adoption) for almost a decade now, etc. These facts do not seem to fit your perception of a backwards-looking country.
The aspects in health care and same-sex marriage are not and have not been particularly controversial in Western Europe as a matter of social policy in that time span. They are interesting points of policy but by themselves nothing special when compared to the number of forward-thinking policies most countries in Western Europe have.
What I have seen, from both personal experience and an amount of anectdote that goes beyond mere personal recollections, is a remarkable lack of interest and knowledge in foreign cultures, and an incredibly regressive management culture in the workplace.
All countries have technological outliers. The point is that they're exactly that, outliers.
The lack of knowledge of foreign languages is clearly a issue. I think that our country is solving this making B1 mandatory to get you graduated and enforcing bilingual basic education on the capital. Not so much, but it seems to start giving some results.
We have to watch doubbed films when we're in groups because this problem. I know people that prefer original versions, but you can not exclude your friends when social watching.
Why not original versions with subtitles?
Yes, that crazy idea would never have been considered in Germany, for example
Can you give examples of that?
1. You can skim an aggregated list of headlines and get a quick glance of current events without ever clicking through to the actual sites, thus causing them to lose out on ad revenue.
2. Newspapers like being linked to but don't want their competitors linked to, and think they'd be better off overall in a world where people directly visited the web site of their preferred news outlet.