A proposed “Google Tax” in Spain could be bad news for news aggregators on the internet.
The Google (GOOG) Tax is designed to force online news aggregators to pay media organizations compensation for the rights to post summaries of their stories. However, the wording of the bill may affect more than just major news aggregators, reports The Wall Street Journal.
Here are a few things to know about the proposed Google Tax, as collected by the WSJ.
- It seeks to raise around €80 million a year in tax revenue.
- The wording of the bill means it could possibly affect bloggers and social media users that share news online.
- Spain’s Culture ministry claims that social media users won’t be affected by the bill.
- The final version of the Google Tax isn’t expected to pass before September.
- It’s undetermined if page views or link clicks will be used to calculate taxes.
A similar incident occurred in Belgium when newspapers won a court case against Google claiming that they should be reimbursed for being listed on its website. Following this, the search giant removed the newspapers from its links and they demanded to be let back on the list, TechDirt notes.
More info on the Google Tax can be seen here.
