Spain Approves 'Google Tax' to Charge News Aggregators Like Bing and Yahoo for Displaying Content Links

Spanish parliament on 30 October, 2014, approved a new intellectual property law, dubbed as the "Google tax", that will allow news publishers to charge news aggregators such as Google to display their news content in search results.

The new law that goes into effect on 1 January is hailed by the government as, "the right of publishing companies and news producers to be paid for the use of their content."

Google had earlier threatened to shut down its news page in Spain should the law be passed, however Spanish parliament approved the measure in a vote on Thursday.

Following the announcement, Google released a statement saying:

We are disappointed with the new law because we think services like Google News help publishers to draw traffic to their websites.

We will continue working with Spanish publishers to help them increase their revenues while examining our options under the new regulations.

While the law has been dubbed as the "Google Tax", it will also have consequences for other web search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo.

A government statement has confirmed that social media sites, like Facebook and Twitter, "are not subject" to the law.

It is still unspecified exactly how much news aggregators will be charged under the new law.