*Updated* Google News in Spain goes Dark

Update: Gizmodo agrees -  http://gizmodo.com/a-big-round-of-applause-to-google-for-shaming-spain-wor-1669840971

In a new take on "planned outage", Google has turned off Google News in Spain over a ridiculous tax for the snippets their search engine displays.

Techdirt calls it the "Nuclear Option", I call it "Well, Duh".

I was kinda hoping they'd do it in Germany or the EU (OMG what a crock!)

I say Go Go Google!

EFF has an important writeup in their blog too - can't resist this quote:

 Online intermediaries may be a convenient scapegoat for the fading fortunes of European newspaper publishers, but banning the use of text snippets alongside website links is a misguided and—now self-evidently
—counter-productive approach. Once it becomes illegal for aggregators to freely link news summaries to publicly-available websites, it becomes that much easier for those who want to prohibit other sorts of links, such as links to political YouTube videos, to make their case.

This will be fun to watch when the news websites in Spain Lose All Their Traffic

It won't shut down until Dec 16, think there will be furious backpedaling at the Spanish news sites?

Hint to Spanish sites:  Look for referer tag in your logs to see how much money you'll lose.