Google News returns to Spain after 7 years

Google News will be returning to Spain after 7 years due to new EU legislation on copyrights.

Google News will be returning to Spain, after closing down its service in 2014, due to new EU legislation on copyrights.

Those in Spain will now be able to have one place to find their news and information on current events. Google News is due to return early next year and they will be small local publishers as well as big ones to get content on Google News Showcase.

In 2014, Goggle made the decision to close down its News service in Spain because of the strict local legislation that required companies like Google to pay a collective fee to local media for rights to share excerpts and headlines on their websites.

However, in 2019 the European Union passed the European Copyright Directive which allows news publishers to require a fee for their content to be linked.

Companies such as Google can negotiate directly with local publishers instead of a standard fee for all online media outlets. Two years later, Spain has made this into legislation, so Google has decided to now open the News platform again.

Large and small Spanish media outlets can now decide how people discover their content and how it is monetised.

Google is also planning on bringing Google News Showcase back to Spain, a licensing programme that pays publishers for their content that will appear on Google News and Discover.

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