The tech giant decided to close Google News in Spain after the country’s government enforced new legislation aimed at protecting local publishers. Under that law, Google would have to pay the publishers for showing their content in its search results. Google announced that Google News in Spain would be closed on 16 December.

Indeed, the local government has recently passed a new copyright law, which imposes fees for Internet content aggregators like Google News in an attempt to protect Spanish print media industry. The law, referred to by many as the “Google tax”, will be enforced in January and requires services that publish links or excerpts of news articles to pay royalties to the local agency. The new legislation will also affect other news aggregators, like Yahoo News. In case of non-compliance, the Spanish authorities will fine websites up to $750,000 for linking to pirated material.

Google points out that it was driving over 10bn clicks to publisher websites on a monthly basis, while its Adsense product that delivers adverts to websites paid out more than $9bn to publishers in 2013, which is up from $7bn the year before. As for its News service, it is currently available in 70 international editions in 35 languages.

It should be noted that Germany also passed a similar law to Spain’s. As a result, Google had to remove newspapers from Google News, but the German publishers took the first step to ask Google to reinstate their indexing after traffic to their websites plummeted.

The “Google tax” is just one of the obstacles the company is currently facing in Europe. In the meantime, a number of European publishers have accused Google search engine of abusing its dominance in search and are currently pressing for action from the EU parliament.