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Wait, who wins here?

Google would presumably stop returning results for Spanish content to avoiding getting charged, resulting in dropped traffic, and less ad dollars.

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The hypothesis is that google is, on the whole, parasitic to news organizations. I think, unlike the hysteria on HN, that it is far from obvious this is wrong. We'll hopefully get to see the results of the experiment.

Looks like the experiment has a good chance of being run soon. If News and Search drop these sites, we'll see whether the 'parasite' has been good or bad for the host.

If this were true, presumably some smart news organizations would be blocking Google from extracting this value by excluding themselves from the index via robots.txt, yet I'm not aware of any.

It seems Rupert Murdoch did this with NewsCorp about 5 years ago, and the decision seems to have been reversed since then: http://www.ibtimes.com/rupert-murdoch-vs-google-google-wins-...

there's an obvious collective action problem that this law fixes

What obvious collective action problem is fixed with this law?

But then Google would be a less valuable search engine. I guess they would sue and eat it in the meantime.

Hardly less valuable. It's not like news search is the killer function of Google's services.

I bet there is a tremendous amount of "news searching".

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