Google News has decided to stop operations in Spain and drop publications based in the country from its listings in response to a new copyright law that will take effect in that country starting in 2015.

The law -- technically an amendment to its current copyright law -- has been called the "Google tax" by analysts, since it requires compensation be paid to news publishers by aggregators (like Google News) for reproducing bits of their content in any form.

It may end up becoming an exemplar of "how not to protect the newspaper industry." Spain's new law will impose a fee for every snippet pulled from Spanish publications, which under the law are supposed to charge sites like Google News for the privilege of running their content.

Importantly, it doesn't just allow Spanish publishers to charge for aggregation; it requires it. Google announced it was dropping Google News in Spain in a blog post on Thursday.

Head of Google News Richard Gingras wrote that while, "Google News creates real value for these publications by driving people to their websites," the popular aggregation services would "have to close" in Spain.

"As Google News itself makes no money (we do not show any advertising on the site)," continued Gingras, "this new approach is simply not sustainable. So it's with real sadness that on 16 December (before the new law comes into affect in January) we'll remove Spanish publishers from Google News and close Google News in Spain."

How exactly the second half of that statement will work is still unknown, though The Washington Post speculated that some kind of IP geolocation might be employed to find news sites whose servers are located within Spain. And while Google News, under the ".es" url suffix will not work, Spanish Internet users will still be able to look up "News.Google.Com" without any trouble -- their browsing simply won't turn up any local publications.

What most importantly remains to be seen is how this will affect news publications in Spain -- both those in the powerful Spanish publishers' association AEDE who pushed for the law, and those on the sidelines who will nevertheless likely suffer a greater lost traffic and visibility as a result.

Independent Spanish publishers and bloggers, in particular, might be disproportionally hit by the Google/Spain spat, since much of their content is only likely to find readers through search and outside aggregators.

But even more traditional publishers with a physical product and a preexisting subscriber base are nevertheless likely to feel the squeeze, in a media market that has already hemorrhaged more than 11,000 journalists and 100 media outlets over the last seven years of the global economic meltdown, according to TheSpainReport.

While journalism as an industry across the globe has been in flux ever since the Internet age began, Spain's attempt to hold back the digital tide -- or somehow control and meter it -- may be one of the biggest backfires and one of the most notorious examples of legislators not understanding the modern age so far this decade. But unlike the other most prevalent instance of SOPA, Spain actually passed it.

And now Google is passing on them. As Knight Center director and tech journalist Dan Gillmor summed up the situation, "Spanish newspapers formed a suicide pact, invited Google to pull the trigger. Google did."