Spanish here: It's exactly like you described, and shameful. To add to the idiocy, it happened right after Germany enacted a similar law, the difference being t

Spanish here: It's exactly like you described, and shameful. To add to the idiocy, it happened right after Germany enacted a similar law, the difference being the German version let news organizations negotiate collective agreements with search engines. Obviously, in less than 1 second, they had an agreement with Google to index for free, because they wanted the traffic more than a fee. So the Spanish government thought they could outsmart the Germans and made a version in which payment was compulsory for all search engines. Everybody saw it coming, except the government.