Google News will return to Spain after the country drops mandatory fees

Google News is making a comeback for Spanish readers early next year.

What you need to know

• Google announced today that it will bring back its Google News service to Spain next year.
• The Spanish government has adopted a new decree that will let Google negotiate payments with local media outlets.
• Google shuttered the service in Spain back in 2014 due to a law that would force the company to pay publishers for their content.

Google News is resuming service in Spain after a seven-year hiatus. The news aggregator will return to the country early next year, after the government overhauled a local copyright law to allow local publishers to negotiate content fees directly with Google.

The country previously forced news aggregators such as Google News to pay local publishers for using their content, even the smallest portions of it like the headline and excerpt, in the News tab of Google Search. That law prompted the search giant to shut down Google News in Spain back in 2014 even before the law took effect.

Earlier this week, Spain adopted the European Copyright Directive, changing its copyright laws. The new law gives Google and local publishers the freedom to decide on licensing fees. This means the search giant will only pay individual publishers whose content appears in the News tab instead of paying all of them.

Media outlets also have complete control over how they want to monetize their content. Previously, they could not opt out of that policy even if they wanted to. For many publishers in the country, the new law also allows them to decide how they want their content to be discovered.

Obviously, the platform can make their content more visible to readers given its magnitude. Google News serves up news articles across multiple devices, including the best Android phones and laptops.

Google also saw this as an opportunity to bring the Google News Showcase to Spain, giving publishers more opportunities to earn revenues from curated content. This revenue sharing model is already available for publishers in other countries like France, Brazil, Australia, and Germany, among others.

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