On 1 May 2021, Google will begin charging new surcharges for ads served in France and Spain.
New surcharges
As of 1 May 2021, we will begin adding a surcharge to your next invoice or statement for ads served in specific countries:
•Ads served in France: a 2% Regulatory Operating Cost added to your invoice or statement.•Ads served in Spain: a 2% Regulatory Operating Cost added to your invoice or statement.
The Regulatory Operating Costs (ROC) are being added to cover part of the costs associated with complying with digital services tax legislation in France and Spain.
Thank you EU and down under for screwing us.
dftf
<p>I still don't fully-understand this link-tax business. As I've said before, I wouldn't visit half the sites I do if it wasn't for clicking on their headline in <em>Google News</em>. I mean, the alternative to not using a news aggregator is you'd have to visit each site individually and to quote the infamous meme: "ain't nobody got time for that"!</p><p><br></p><p>I mean, what are the industries arguments otherwise? "They're stealing our headline, and some users only read the headlines and never click the story" — okay, so you'd really want such-users visiting your site directly? They don't sound like they're going to be on it long. Or "<em>Google News</em> wouldn't exist without us". Yeah… and you wouldn't exist without the news stories you report. You pay your reporters, but you don't pay all of the people who make-up the news story itself, do you? So that would be an interesting standard to be held to: you report on a burglary. Does that mean you have to pay the burglar, as without them, the story wouldn't exist. Or what about every-time you write news about a celeb. Should you pay them each time? </p>