Spaniard here.

Google tax was just a ploy from our crony capitalist government to divert money towards publishers aligned with them (i.e. most major news outlets). Actually, the publishers are the ones who promoted it (lobbying for it long before it was even a law proposal) and the government just followed its masters (the two large media groups who own mostly everything).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AEDE

> In response, Google announced that they would be shutting down the Spanish version of their Google News service.

>

> The AEDE reacted by lobbying the Spanish government to force Google to keep it running.

It would be funny if it wasn't so worrying.

__

Fortunately this just looks like public workers from AEPD (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, Spanish Agency of Data Protection) doing their jobs.

AEPD is one of the few public organizations I'm glad we have.

How is your government capitalist? You are drowned in bureaucracy, taxes and debt not capitalism.

I am not taking this story as an example. Most of southern Europe countries are far from being capitalist.

He said "crony capitalist", which is quite a different thing to capitalist.

I personally prefer the word "corporatist" for this phenomenon to avoid this ambiguity. Crony-captalist has an anti-capitalist tinge, which I don't favor, but is one reason why I think is has been adopted broadly.

The mere fact that <X> was damaged because <Y> happened doesn't necessarily mean Y was a bad thing. We live in a dynamic world, and society reshapes itself constantly.

Right -- legitimate competition and recognized Fair Use [1] could do the same the the same thing, and (at least in the US) simply reading off newspaper headlines isn't considered a copyright violation.

The question is whether they did something illegal that hurt their industry.

[1] I know, different legal system but whatever their equivalent is