A new tax initiative by the Spanish government has threatened not only news aggregators, but social media users who share news from media organizations. The "Google Tax" bill, according to the Wall Street Journal, seeks to obtain an annual tax revenue of €80 million for the country's cash-strapped local media industry. The initiative seeks to force news aggregators to pay for the right to post summaries of the latter's news stories.
Critis have been worried about the bill, even though that similar initiatives have been attempted in Germany, France and Belgium over the last few years. The Spanish initiative is said to be wide-ranging, and supposedly showed the illiteracy of the Spanish government about the worldwide Web. WSJ said that the way the initiative is written will also force social media users who share stories from traditional media organizations to their families and friends.
Spanish Internet consultancy expert Daniel Marcos for Endas said, "This is clearly intended to have Google and other big aggregators pay, but it's a very wide-ranging bill that may force people to pay for posting links to news in their Facebook FB -1.46% and Twitter TWTR -2.44% accounts too."
The "Google Tax" law, which is known in Spanish congress as Canon AEDE, will be needing senate approval in September, the Guardian said. Should that be the case, the consequences of the operations of Google and other popular sites like Reddit and Digg will be disruptive.
Quartz, on the other hand, has pose a challenge to the backers of Canon AEDE to answer the following questions first before Spain actually allows such law to be passed. The online news site wrote, "How much compensation is due per link? Who arbitrates in the event of a dispute? And in a world where every news outlet writes the same story, what is exclusive content?"
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