Google News Likely to Close in EU Due to Link Tax

Google’s VP of News Richard Gingras said last week that they may shut down Google News due to a proposal that may result to the charging of “link tax” designed to compensate news publishers for the use of their articles.

 

Gingras said that they won’t be able to make a decision until they see the final language of the proposal. However, he also said that the search giant was forced to close Google News in Spain the last time such a proposal was attempted, which led to the drop in traffic to news sites.

 

Google had been lobbying hard against the the European link tax legislation, known as Article 11, and its sister legislation Article 13, which seeks to pay content creators for material uploaded to sites such as YouTube.

 

Source: The Guardian