Spain has just bought in what's being known as the "Google Tax" which is a set of intellectual property laws that lets news publishers get paid every time their content is linked within search results.

The same thing happened last year in Germany where Google having to strip down its news service to accommodate the requests of German publishers.

While the press has been claiming that this is bad news for Google they are also saying that it is bad for the Internet. The only problem is that it isn’t. Google News is one of the worst things to happen to the Internet.

A world where Google decides what is news is hell on toast. Now you don’t have to be to bright to work out that this is not a good thing. I have worked on two news sites which have been killed off when Google changed its search algorithm and redefined them so that they were no longer news sites and they disappeared without trace. Meanwhile news sites with no original content but are designed to Google’s SEO requirements are given top billing.

This means that Google has far too much power to decide which magazines do well and which fail.

The Spanish law is equally rubbish and favours those old style newspapers who still think they are living in the 1950s. Anything that limits Google’s ability to choose the news has to be a good thing.