Google News to return to Spain early next year
The move follows changes to a local law that will let media outlets negotiate with the tech giant.
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Google News will soon be available again in Spain after the country amended a law that imposed fees on news aggregators for using local publishers' content.
"We made this decision as a result of a new Royal Decree implementing the European Copyright Directive, introduced today by the Spanish government," Fuencisla Clemares, head of Google Iberia, said Wednesday in a blog post.
Google News, the tech giant's site and app that serves up links to new stories, closed in Spain in 2014 after the country passed legislation requiring aggregator services that post links and excerpts of news articles to pay a fee to the Association of Editors of Spanish Dailies, an organization that represents the Spanish newspaper industry. Failure to do so could result in fines of up to €600,000, or roughly $700,000.
This week the country adopted a European copyright law that will allow Spanish media outlets to negotiate directly with Google over revenue sharing and how content is used. Spanish officials said the amended law brings "national copyright legislation into step with the digital environment" and will benefit publishers and other creators, Reuters reported.
The service will be available again early next year, Google said.